Hinatea Colombani : Keeping Culture Alive

Some women carry stories. Others make sure they are never forgotten.

There is a rhythm to Hinatea Colombani’s world.

The sound of a i‘e meeting bark. The movement of a body through ‘ori Tahiti. The quiet patience of hands working with fibres, plants and natural pigments. The stories of those who came before us, told again so they can belong to those who come next. Artist, dancer, cultural practitioner and woman of transmission, Hinatea has spent years exploring what it means to keep culture alive. Not frozen in time. Not simply preserved. Alive.

Long before barkcloth became one of the defining threads of her work, Hinatea expressed culture through her body. She trained in ‘ori Tahiti with figures including Makau Foster and Manouche Lehartel, travelling internationally with the group Toa Reva before later working alongside Makau. In 2008, she founded her own traditional dance school, Matehaunui. But movement alone was never going to be enough.

Behind every gesture was a story. Behind every rhythm, a meaning. And Hinatea wanted to understand them. Her curiosity began to extend beyond dance, towards oral traditions, music, ancestral knowledge, plants, food, craftsmanship and the many practices that together form a culture.

Culture, she understood, could not simply be performed. It had to be lived.

In 2016, together with her partner Moeava Meder, Hinatea created the Centre Culturel ‘Arioi in Papara. More than a cultural centre, ‘Arioi was imagined as a place of gathering and transmission, somewhere generations, artists, locals and visitors could meet around Polynesian knowledge.

Dance. Music. Reo Tahiti. Tapa. Weaving. Gastronomy. Different practices, but one shared purpose: reconnecting people with the culture around them. Because transmission, for Hinatea, is not about looking backwards. It is about giving knowledge somewhere to go.

Then came tapa.

An encounter with a friend from Rapa Nui brought Hinatea back to a material she had crossed paths with years earlier through dance. This time, something stayed. The smell. The texture. The repetitive sound of bark being beaten. The transformation of a plant into cloth. What began almost instinctively became years of research, experimentation and exchange across the Pacific.

Alongside Moeava, Hinatea began cultivating aute, the paper mulberry used to make tapa, studying traditional processes, creating natural dyes and pigments, making tools and reconnecting with tapa makers throughout Oceania. The process begins long before an artwork exists. It begins in the soil. An aute tree must grow. It must be tended to. Its bark harvested and prepared. The fibres are soaked, fermented and beaten, little by little, until something that once belonged to a tree becomes an expanse of cloth. And then the colour. Plants, roots, earth, ash.

And finally, the hand of the artist.

For generations, tapa held an essential place throughout Oceania. It clothed bodies. Wrapped sacred objects. Accompanied ceremonies and significant moments of life. In the Society Islands, however, its practice largely disappeared.

Today, Hinatea and Moeava are part of a movement bringing its knowledge and gestures back into the present, not by reproducing the past exactly as it was, but by allowing an ancestral material to speak again.

Through Tapa Tahiti and their wider Tapa Revival work, tapa becomes simultaneously material, archive and artistic language. Their pieces move beyond the idea of craft alone, entering contemporary art spaces while remaining inseparable from the land and knowledge from which they originate.

In 2024, Hinatea's work formed part of Aumoana, a collective Pacific installation presented at the 24th Biennale of Sydney. A year later, monumental tapa works by Hinatea and Moeava were shown beneath the glass roof of Paris' Grand Palais for the Biennale Révélations. And in 2026, their work ‘A Fano Mai entered the collections of the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris.

From Papara to Sydney to Paris, the material travels. But its roots remain here.

For several years, Hinatea has also been part of the EIMEO family as one of our cultural ambassadors. A relationship that feels natural. Because beyond clothing, EIMEO has always been about the Pacific we belong to, its landscapes, its people, its creativity and the stories that continue to shape us.

Through Hinatea, we are reminded that culture is not only what we inherit.

It is what we choose to carry.

What we practise.
What we question.
What we share.
What we leave behind.

And somewhere in Papara, the aute continues to grow. The bark is harvested. The i‘e meets the fibre again.

And an old rhythm continues, not as an echo of the past, but as the sound of something very much alive.