Hoʻākea Source 2024 Grant Awardees

Kauhale

Anuhea & Kailikapu
2024 Grant Recipients

The collective will inhabit hale within gentrified communities to interpret Hawaiʻi's current housing crisis. This crisis, emerging out of the illegal occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom and decades of systemic violence, becomes the crossroad wherein Hawaiians must actualize new solutions to evolving problems. “Inhabitation” refers to appropriating homes in haole communities for Hawaiian bodies through communal living. This practice re-imagines the Kauhale: a group of houses—a sustainable system of relationality. We seek to answer: How can kauhale persist today in the political and bio-cultural landscape of our contemporary age? How does land theft—haole resource extraction—shape a community’s ability to create communal living spaces? How will environments built to exclude Hawaiians transform through presence? Kauhale will culminate in a zine and exhibition.

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Anuhea Nihipali is a multimedia maker born and raised on O'ahu. Nihipali exposes an indigenous experience through meme, comedy, and poetry on social media. As an autistic and queer individual, they also seek to process information in the digital age through this lens. Articulating the small moments of their experience in the mundane, the tragic, and the orgasmic– Kalima performs.Kailikapu is an inoa kupuna invoking seven generations of geological and bio-cultural change in the district of Puna, Hawaiʻi. Kailikapu places primacy in the aesthetic principle of materiality and how human relationships to our finite resources define beauty. It thinks in images of contradiction. Both Pious and profane, Kailikapu exists in the intimacy where ruin and redemption reconcile; prostrate in prayer to both the biblical and the pagan. Academic and Intuitive; She is the cracking open of the earth and the scented shade of pandanus trees. Nainoa Rosehill is the 3rd great grandson of Kailikapu.