From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
whānau
whānau (Māori: family, kinship group) is a participatory adaptation rooted in Māori oral tradition and whakairo practice. Not to be confused with non-Māori Beach Surgery works; see Māori and indigenous adaptations.
whānau is a participatory oral theatre and whakairo (carving) adaptation of Beach Surgery, created collaboratively by Māori artists and communities across Taranaki and Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington). Rather than narrating the story, whānau enacts the principle of whānaungatanga (kinship)—the mutual obligation and care-relationship between people—as the story itself.
The work is structured around six poupou (carved posts), each representing one chapter of Leif and Katita's journey. Each poupou is carved over one month by a different artist or collective, embedding genealogy and place-knowledge into the wood. Each post features the coin (one side, turning), the leather armour, and the sound of the earth rubbing against space rendered in traditional patterning and figural motifs.
Alongside the carved posts, six kai (communal food preparations) are prepared by the community using local ingredients, Māori culinary knowledge, and the principles of manaakitanga (hospitality). These meals are shared during six hikoi (walking pilgrimages) that trace physical paths through both cities, linking whakairo to landscape to body to kinship.
The whānau cycle completes once per year. No two cycles are identical; performers, carvers, and cooks change; the story arrives in the bodies and hands that touch it. Leif and Katita are understood not as individual characters but as relatives—ancestors of the future, present in the act of gathering and feeding each other. The glitch is the space between one meal and the next, between one carver's hands and another's; it is where whānaungatanga lives.