Tapa fragment of Siapo - Lau agafalu
Futuna Island, Western Polynesia
Chinese mulberry or paper mulberry - Broussonetia papyrifera and vegetable dyes
Middle of the 20th century
L. 405 cm l. 218 cm
Provenance :
Private collection, New Caledonia
Collectively, the Futunian women beat the bast of the paper mulberry tree and by gluing with manioc starch, assemble the multitude of strips obtained, into large sheets called siapo tekumi.
The tekumi can have a hundred numbers written laterally on the white strips, corresponding to about 45 meters. These customary siapo are opened and presented to the people who are to be honored: for a wedding, a birth, a death. Once the festivities are over, they are then traditionally cut transversally into 5, 10, 20 numbers and given to the guests. The pieces received are preciously preserved and become part of the family heritage. The originality of this siapo is that it is the beginning of the sheet with the initial numbering, something extremely rare.
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