This is one of the highlights of this month of May: the coronation of King Carlos III will be held this Saturday May 6 in London. If it’s just the UK, the scope of the event is obviously international and not necessarily to everyone’s taste.
This is particularly the case in New Zealand, where, 16,000 kilometers away, the population is faced with a permanent influx of news on this subject. To go against the current of this media coverage, a Maori artist has created an extension that allows all news related to the coronation to be replaced by news about Maori culture and life, reveals the British newspaper The Guardian May 4, 2023.
“Power to Unplug”
“[Ici], people are tired, they don’t care how much a diamond costs or who wears a dress. All over the world, indigenous peoples are uninterested in this constant rhetoric of frivolity and class,” says Hāmiora Bailey, the artist, to the guardian.
This plugin (an extension that is installed in a browser, for example) is called Pikari Mai. It is free and has the utility of locating all articles related to the coronation of King Charles III, by keywords or images, and replacing them with articles produced by Maori media or institutions.
“For indigenous people, the fanfare and media coverage surrounding the royal coronation is beyond annoying. So we created Pikari Mai, an extension that cuts the “pōtae.” [“couverture”, en maori, NDLR]replacing real gossip with indigenous news,” reads the Pikari Mai website.
BFMTV tested the extension on the website of the guardian. After appearing, the links (here in pink) direct Internet users to Maori news:
Between the lines of this sleight of hand, the artist effectively reminds the Guardian of the painful colonial past of his people and his country, between land confiscations, exactions and unjustified arrests.
Source: BFM TV
