Container Series

Black Salt, Black Stone

Studio Kiin

About the work

Black Salt, Black Stone is a storytelling and creative exchange project produced by Studio Kiin that connects Black diasporas. Through a series of online talanoa, in-person gatherings, and installation activations across Oceania we re-imagine the “festival model” and explore what futurism means from our own cultural, political, and personal perspectives - whether rooted in ancestral knowledge, spiritual cosmologies, sci-fi visions, or everyday acts of dreaming forward to vision Black Oceania together. In our Performance Arcade container installation, African and Melanesian artists based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Wairarapa, Whangārei, Te Awa Kairangi ki Tai, Boorloo, Gimuy, and London invite you to engage with their reflections on the relationship between memory and temporality.

About the artist

Studio Kiin
Aotearoa

Founded in 2021, Studio Kiin is an Indigenous-led creative studio and collective working across Australia, Aotearoa and the Pacific region. We are a family of storytellers who are working to normalise story sovereignty, cultivate kinship and prioritise healing in creative practice. Studio Kiin work across arts, education, publishing, and cultural strategy.

We are passionate about empowering artists to lead with culturally responsive, ethical and sustainable creative practice. Our methods are tailored to the specific needs of each community, project and partnership we collaborate with through the honouring place, space and time that they exist in.

Our publishing platforms include Rarama Ink - an independent press arm dedicated to stories by and for Indigenous peoples, and Talanoa, a digital storytelling platform for Oceanic stories.
           
N’Gadie Roberts
N'Gadie Roberts is an Australian writer, poet, librettist, and award-winning dramaturgist from Perth, Western Australia. She is also the author of Grave Delights. Her words have been translated into Dutch, commissioned by composer, Bobbie-Jane Gardiner who worked on Netflix’s “Queen Charlotte”, and celebrated in prestigious literary journals, websites, and societies including SHOWStudio, Westerly, Cordite Poetry Review, Insider Guides, and The Howard University Writer's Guild to name a few.

In 2024 N'Gadie's poem, Mami Wata was orated by actress, Cynthia Erivo and featured in the The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s (MET) Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion exhibition, with a visual installation by fashion photographer, Nick Knight CBE. She was also a librettist for the United Kingdom's first Black-and-Asian-led opera production of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, which received a letter of endorsement from His Majesty, King Charles.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Cultural Studies with Honours in Creative Writing, as well as a Master of Clinical Audiology degree from The University of Western Australia (UWA), and enjoys cycling, coastal walks and synth pop.

Isoa Tupua
Community organiser, Producer, Photographer and Writer, Isoa aims to create work that stands to archive the presence of black and brown, queer bodies, whilst pushing for a liberated future through storytelling and workshop facilitation. With over 10 years of working with young people with complex lived experience, Isoa has adopted ways of thinking and working to engage young people in decolonial conversations around class, race, gender and sexuality.
Ultimately, the purpose is to look at what has worked in the past and bring it into the future with everyone in mind; guiding conversations towards a world we dream of. 

Ornella Mutoni
Ornella Mutoni is a documentary director, producer, and cultural worker whose work explores collective healing and the legacy of trauma through intimate storytelling. Her directorial debut ‘The Things We Don’t Say’, premiered at Aesthetica Short Film Festival, was selected for the New York African Film Festival and Palm Springs International Short Fest and was distributed by The Guardian. The film also earned her a nomination for the Gaby Rado Award for New Journalist at the 2025 Amnesty Media Awards.

She has worked in prime-time broadcast TV and video journalism for 6 years with award-winning production companies making a range of documentaries for UK, Australian, Dutch, and American broadcasters.

Ornella is also the Pop Culture and Social Change Producer at Counterpoints Arts, where she advocates for more authentic migrant and refugee narratives that centre lived experience voices in the creative process.

Linda Iriza
Linda Iriza is a Rwandan people weaver, creative producer and a community-aunty-in-training
currently living on Whadjuk Country. Her work navigates African methodologies, ways of being and frameworks of collectiveness. Spanning across producing intimate writing workshops to large community gatherings, they continue to find ways of honouring traditions of dreaming up expansive worlds.

She has worked with Perth Festival, Fremantle Arts Centre, Arts House, Studio Kiin, Community Arts Network, Creative Australia and the Ministry of Youth and Culture in Rwanda.

Iriza is interested in learning more about the art of storytelling, Indigenous approaches to anti-colonial resistance, afropresentism and intersectional feminist work.

Makanaka Tuwe
Makanaka Tuwe (she/her/they) is an educator, researcher, storyteller, social sciences scholar, writer and cultural producer living in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) by way of Zimbabwe. Her work focuses on the intersection of histories of social systems, healing and affirming methodologies, and processes, alternative teaching practices and the role of indigenous knowledge systems, storytelling and other ways of knowledge sharing as drivers of social and cultural transformation. She is currently a Doctoral Candidate at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), and has worked there as Teaching Assistance since 2018. Her current research explores how queer people of African heritage cultivate and nurture home, family and community. She holds a Masters in International Communication and has experience in non-for-profit, corporate and education sectors. Makanaka has previously founded Afrika on My Sleeve (2013 - 2018) and Afrodaze (2018 - 2022), and is a member of Studio Kiin. She loves eating and cooking delicious food, travelling and a good laugh. 

Emele Ugavule
Emele Ugavule is a Tokelauan, Uvean, and Fijian storyteller, working as a performer, writer, movement director, director, creative producer, cultural strategist and educator. A graduate of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (Cert II in Musical Theatre), National Institute of Dramatic Arts (Bachelor of Dramatic Arts - Acting), and Te Kura Toi Whakaari o Aotearoa (Masters of Creative Performance Practice) she has worked with various artists and organisations across the Pacific.

Her work centres on Indigenous Oceanic storytelling, exploring themes of temporality, memory, kinship, technology and knowledge transmission.

She is a founding member of Studio Kiin, an Indigenous-led creative studio and collective, served as the Creative Director of Talanoa, a platform dedicated to Oceanic digital storytelling, and is represented by Liberty Artist Management.

Emele has spoken as a moderator, panelist and keynote speaker at events and festivals in Switzerland, Aotearoa, Fiji and Australia. She has contributed to story development and cultural dramaturgy for Pacific stories with Netflix, ABC and Mad Ones Films, Comedy Central, West Park and Culture Factory and mentored Pacific storytellers through Parramatta Artist Studios, Casula Powerhouse, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists.

Emele has tutored at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and the National Institute of Dramatic Arts and currently she is a Kaitātaki Whakaari at Te Kura Toi Whakaari o Aotearoa: NZ Drama School.

Natasha Ratuva
Natasha is a multidisciplinary artist, born and raised in Fiji. She hails from the beautiful islands of Kadavu and Vanua Levu. Natasha currently lives in Aotearoa, New Zealand with her husband and their daughter on their family farm within the boundaries of Ngāti Rākaiwhakairi lands. Here they enjoy raising animals, growing food, planting trees and living close to nature.

Ratuva's creative practice spans the mediums of photography, moving image, digital art and masi or Fijian barkcloth. In recent years Ratuva has brought masi to the forefront of her creative practice. Made from the paper mulberry tree masi is a treasured ceremonial item ever present throughout a person's life carrying deep cultural significance. Ratuva is particularly interested in the complex visual languages that adorn masi and embody the sacred connection to the vanua (land) and iTaukei cosmology.

For time immemorial masi has been adorned with plant and earth based inks and dyes reinforcing its connection to the vanua. Like her ancestors living and passed she also hand paints with natural pigments and dyes to reinterpret traditional patterns within contemporary compositions.

Elsie Andrewes
Fijian (Navala, Nakoroboya, Ba) / Pakeha digital artist and illustrator based in Whangārei. Works are rooted in my heritage, with a focus on exploring themes of identity, natural heritage and more recently impacts of climate change to these regions. My creative practice is informed by current events locally and globally, as well as having a keen interest in myths and legends, and science fiction. Commissioned by the World Bank, IFC, Talanoa, Witness Performance and Huia Publishers, and exhibited in both Aotearoa and Australia with Studio Kiin.

Deanna Maladina
Deanna is a storyteller, creative producer, and communications strategist working across fashion, screen, live events, and digital platforms. Her work explores identity, heritage, and representation, weaving Papua New Guinean cultural perspectives with contemporary design and media. With a foundation in multimedia production and account management, she brings both creative vision and strong operational skills to her projects. Deanna has experience producing and stage managing live events, developing fashion and style narratives, and creating digital content that engages diverse audiences. Her work is rooted in cultural storytelling and community, with a focus on clarity, creativity, and authentic connection.