Aqua Nullius: Talaucaka
Te Whaea Theatre, 2025
Writer / Director / Actor / Costume Designer: Emele Ugavule
Actor: Selina Alesana Alefosio, Tamia Filipo, Maurea Varea-Perez
Production Manager / LX Designer: Alexander Dickson
Production Designer: Grace O’Brien
Sound Designer: Ephraim Frame
AV Designer: Reuben Nicolas
Costume maker: Thiwanka Wijewadarna
Photography: Taylor-Rose Terekia
Aqua Nullius is a century-spanning Pasifika futurist universe where the Pacific’s waters, lands, lineages, and digital shadows form a contested realm of erased and reclaimed Indigenous sovereignty. Across five plays, it explores water, memory, and colonialism—physical, ecological, and digital. Within this world, amongst everyday peoples we meet Pacific superheroes who wield ancestral, oceanic powers to defend both their homelands from ongoing extraction and erasure.
Talaucaka is the third play in the Aqua Nullius Universe, and the sequel to Toe Fai!
Set in a future dystopian England after ecological collapse, we meet former British Museum tour guide, Kalala, alongside three other Pacific women working as data annotators.