Natasha Matila-Smith is an arts practitioner based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Matila-Smith has developed a series of confessional text-based works that explore her experiences of loneliness and discomfort, and how they relate to larger social and economic structures. She frequently speaks from her position as an indigenous woman of colour, herself Samoan Pākehā, a position where multiple sites of oppression intersect and are intimately related to the body. She uses her art to vocalise this position, developed out of a desire to connect with others.  

Matila-Smith has written extensively about the impulse of New Zealand art institutions to define and exoticise indigenous bodies and cultures. In raising discourse around the disconnection between digital interfaces and their underlying structures, she’s also suggesting the disconnect is so intuitive it’s the tacit knowledge that governs and connects us all.