MARCH 2026 by HOLLI MCENTEGART & RACHEL JANE LIEBERT

This month witnesses the passing of both Ngakinga and Holli’s mama, Mandy – both of whom Holli (one of our Pākehā co-researchers) has been religiously caring for throughout TTP.

A public art project to harvest both natural dyes and the multi-coloured grief of dying, Ngakinga has always been a space of and for collective care. As a community garden, it has drawn attention to the material labour of love – in birth, in parenting, in friendship, in death – human and non-human.

In doing so it has drawn attention to the care and labour of decolonisation. Through Indigenous and white settler collaboration with native and non-native plants, Ngakinga has experimented with joining the tika and the pagan – seeing how the latter can nourish the former and be nourished itself in doing so. It has been a project of surrendering – to elements, seasons, vandalism, (seeming) scarcity – of ultimately needing each other, and of needing to simply keep going.

And it has been worlding – a wild intensity of lush colour bursting out of an apocalyptic scene of ‘development’ and exhausted earth, adorned with clothes-lines of old cotton nappies dyed by the flowers and hand-stitched with learnings from our more-than-human communing. Ngakinga cries that another world is not just possible but here-now – if we commit to care and labour.

On our last day together, a week after Mandy’s passing, friends and collaborators from TTP together harvested Ngakinga’s giant sunflowers. They were taken to Ihumātao – a powerful site of Indigenous sovereignty, landback and mana wāhine – to be dried and then made into perfectly strange taonga pūoro. By shifting the shape of these mighty settler putiputi into makers of Indigenous oro , we honour their wisdom about being transplants (not supplants) in a settler colonial state.

And we continue the spirit of the mara – and of Mandy – and of TTP - through new sensorial and material spaces.