20 minute workout, a work-in-progress by maliewai productions, a nebulous group of family and friends committed to abundant and intersectional futures for the Hawaiian Islands. Structured around a 20 minute workout, maliewai’s parodic exercise video is a gift of love, a gesture of solidarity, and a reminder that joy is also a form of resistance—aloha nō.

Over the past decade public statues, monuments, and memorials commemorating racist figures and whitewashed histories have been passionately debated on international scales. In spite of this long overdue reckoning, physical reminders of colonialism, imperialism, and empire still stand across Hawaiʻi.

20 minute workout is part of a larger project, Revisiting Kealakekua Bay, Reworking the Captain Cook Monument (2018 – 2025) which gathers together interventionist proposals by a motley crew of artists and practitioners. Since 2018, the underlying aims of this collaborative and slow moving endeavor have remained the same: to revisit an ancestral place and rework a historic monument; honor untold stories of intergenerational resistance in Hawaiʻi; address legacies of scientific colonialism in the Pacific; and activate pathways toward remediated futures already in the making.

Mākaukau? ‘AE!

watch 20 minute workout on vimeo