During the 1980s economic recession, struggling small towns across Aotearoa built large roadside sculptures – or Big Things – to sell unique provincial identities and attract passing motorists. Currently, more than two-dozen Big Things are peppered across the country’s landscape, contributing to the production, performance, and tourism marketing of particular places and identities. But whose stories do these kitsch novelty structures tell? This project brings a critical gaze to the privileging of Pākehā-centred narratives in current research on the topic. Adopting a transformative epistemology, it attends to the ways in which Big Things can be an apparatus of forgetting settler-colonial histories, to provoke a new way of thinking about hegemonic constructions of colonial objects and the way these obscure land dispossession. Weaving together feminist, participatory, and filmic geographies, this project seeks to re-center alternative narratives currently hidden in the Big Things’ shadows to culminate in a scholarly monograph and six short documentary films; one from each field-site. Internationally, this research is a timely Antipodean contribution to contemporary scholarship examining the complex negotiations of decolonising public spaces, and the role that statues – however innocuous they may seem – occupy within them.

This project is funded by the Royal Society Te Apārangi Marsden Fast-Start Grant (Social Sciences Panel – NZD $360,000 over 3 years). It was selected as one of 22 projects highlighted on the Royal Society Marsden Fund landing page. 

A separate project website is coming in 2024.