Isaiah Swann, Dear Kāinga Ora, 2026, single Channel digital video, Kapisiga Fano a Koe – Hiapo, timber, found materials.

Developed in response to Kāinga Ora’s proposed redevelopment of my Nena’s state house in Massey, this series of works reflects on the experiences of those whose lives become subject to decisions made by larger institutional powers at play. Across Tāmaki Makaurau, houses once occupied by generations of families have gradually disappeared behind construction fences and redevelopment sites, becoming part of an ongoing conversation around housing intensification and urban growth.

While acknowledging the realities of Auckland’s housing crisis and the need for increased housing supply, this project shifts attention away from policy, planning documents, and redevelopment targets, and towards the communal essence of living within these spaces. It considers the social and cultural realities embedded within place, drawing attention to the relationships, histories, and support networks that cannot be measured through infrastructure alone.

For a total of 48 years, my Nena’s home has existed as part of a tightly connected neighbourhood shaped by generations of relationships, routines, and mutual care. This work emerged from a desire to advocate for the neighbouring homes of our street, whom were already facing the backend of their eviction notices. In understanding what was in jeopardy, beyond the loss of the physical home, the video work adopted a deliberately confrontational position. Rather than operating from a position of passivity, it was conceived as a direct response to Kāinga Ora and the institutions responsible for these decisions. This response took form through tagging a message directly onto the house itself, foregrounding the urgency of the situation while leaving room to consider how certain state houses are kept – between tenancies or the concluding decision to proceed with demolishing. With a little bit of luck, Kāinga ora reached out after seeing the message and made the ultimate decision to let us keep the home.

So, these works serve as an acknowledgement of my Nena’s journey from Niue to Niu Sila, the sacrifices and efforts both known and unspoken. Her state house forms part of a much larger story shared by many Pacific families who migrated, settled, and built communities across Aotearoa, paying homage to the generations whose stories have made our own possible.

This particular situation emerged at a time when I had begun questioning my own relationship to image-making as a photographer. I found myself asking how the lens could exist alongside cultural practices such as hiapo, and whether photography could become a contemporary extension of our traditional methods of storytelling. While hiapo has historically carried genealogies, histories, and lived experience through symbols, pattern, and material, there was an interest in what might happen when these narratives - particularly the situation with my Nena were communicated through literal representations of moving image.

In harbouring an interest in both respective practices, there is also a position of operating two bodies of knowledge at once: the ancestral and the lived contemporary. This sits at the centre of the work and becomes a way of thinking through time itself. The lens offers immediacy of the moment and Hiapo requires the patience of the day, a cyclical practice in nature. Both measures of time mirroring the wider conditions of housing, where long-standing tenancies remain in a state of uncertain temporality often decided by shifting decisions and imposed timelines. Across the works, this is echoed in the interplay of projected light, where time is both recorded and continually in motion, existing as a layered and unstable presence rather than a fixed point of completion.