Public Programming
'ENZO CAMACHO + AMI LIEN: OFFERINGS FOR ESCALANTE'
EXHIBITION AND PUBLIC PROGRAMME
CCA Berlin, Germany
24.04.2024 - 29.06.2024
We are delighted to collaborate with CCA Berlin (Centre for Contemporary Arts Berlin) to present the public programme accompanying the exhibition 'Offerings for Escalante' by Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien. ‘Offerings for Escalante’ showcases a new body of work created between Berlin and the Philippines, the culmination of the artist duo's many years of fieldwork on the plantation island of Negros and their extensive investigation into the ongoing struggles for food sovereignty and land justice across borders. The exhibition runs from 24 April to 29 June 2024.
Accompanying the exhibition, the public programme aims to activate community-based dialogues. It seeks to open up discussions around food sovereignty, environmental and land justice, as well as collective strategies against political oppression and violence, exploring how these themes relate to communities living in Berlin.
The public programme includes guided tours, a concert performance by Alyana Cabral, a four-part screening programme curated by our 2023 Curatorial Fellow at Whitechapel Gallery Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, and a one-day symposium with activists and collectives from Berlin, Manila, and beyond, featuring Lisa Ito-Tapang, Donna Miranda, Angelo Suárez, and ALPAS Pilipinas among others. Through these gatherings, the artists intend to challenge the prevailing politics of remembrance. They aim to create space for continuous and collective learning, conversation, and strategising, in the face of our increasingly fractured and constricted cultural sphere.
PUBLIC PROGRAMME
LANGIT / LUPA (HEAVEN / EARTH)
A Concert Performance by Alyana Cabral feat. a community choir
28 April 2024, 7-9PM
Kaiser-Wilhem-Gedächtniskirche, Chapel
Named after Langit Lupa, the centrepiece experimental documentary in Camacho and Lien's exhibition, this performance aims to be a collective ritual and sonic memorial for innocent lives lost, remembering the Escalante massacre of 1985 during the Marcos regime, the continuing struggle for land and justice by landless farmers and indigenous people in the Philippines, and its connection to the displaced people of Palestine.
SCREENING PROGRAMME
curated by Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung
7 May, 21 May, 4 June, 18 June 2024, 7PM
Kaiser-Wilhem-Gedächtniskirche, Foyer building
Both the Hegelian owl and the Benjaminian angel look back at the past; they are the animals of retrospection… The first wants to understand, to grasp the time in the notion; the second—to awaken the dead. These two figures might look melancholic, but in fact they are not; there is actually a kind of very unobvious happiness or enjoyment that can be traced in their psychic portraits.
—Oxana Timofeeva, How to love a homeland (2021), 27.
Somewhere in the process the flowers wither and the whole world smells of open wounds.
—Trinh T. Minh-ha, Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared (2016), 1.
At the core of 'Offerings for Escalante' is Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien’s film Langit Lupa (2023), which follows the afterlife of the 1985 Escalante Massacre on the island of Negros in the Philippines. The film weaves together a series of documentary encounters spanning interviews and testimonials, alongside formal and narratological experiments: natural materials foraged on Negros by the artists are transformed into cinematic collages that flash in the vein of Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963), nursery rhymes become songs of commemoration, and the passage of time—which is to say, the risk of forgetting—becomes nullified through children reenacting funerary rituals for those who were martyred. Against the backdrop of Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s current regime and its attempts to suppress those testifying to structural violence in the Philippines, Langit Lupa explores how the Escalante Massacre endures as both a rupture and inflection point in Negros’ collective memory, whilst also portraying the revolutionary culture that subsists among the people.
Echoing Camacho and Lien’s understanding of official history as a site of struggle and contestation, this screening programme is constructed around Walter Benjamin’s ideal of the artist as one who works 'not to report, but to struggle' alongside the oppressed; to “not play the role of a spectator, but actively intervene” in changing collective material conditions. Included in this programme are films that query the points at which spectatorship transforms into intervention during moments of calamity and injustice. Filmmakers and artists such as Layaly Badr, Assia Djeba, Claire Denis, Tracey Moffatt, Paloma Polo, and others provide apertures through which one can locate the will towards emancipation in geographically disparate struggles against imperialism. Here, the stories of colonised subjects from Algeria, Australia, the Philippines, and Palestine ought to be instructive for our own political imagination and its transformation into external action. Wrote Bertolt Brecht: 'As soon as the human being appears as an object the causal connections become decisive.'
—Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung
This four-part screening programme will run fortnightly between 7 May – 18 June 2024. A detailed list of films will be announced soon.
SYMPOSIUM WITH ACTIVISTS AND COLLECTIVES FROM BERLIN, MANILA AND BEYOND
Location will be announced soon. 16 June 2024, 12AM-6PM
The symposium aims to explore the connection between activist practices among artists and cultural workers on the one hand, broader social movement and political mobilisation among farmers and plantation workers on the other. Taking the Philippine context as a starting point, the symposium asks how these different forms of organisation mutually inform and entangle with each other, and in what way do they strike a resonance with struggles in other places in the world that are bearing witness to the enduring fight for land justice, to transnational movements against belligerent occupation, privatisation and environmental destruction. With contributions from Lisa Ito-Tapang, Donna Miranda, Angelo Suárez, ALPAS Pilipinas, Enzo Camacho, Ami Lien, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung among others.
For more information on the exhibition and the public programme, see here
BIOGRAPHY
Alyana Cabral a.k.a. t33g33 is a polydisciplinary artist, and singer / producer / DJ. Her aim is a queerification of sound practice through extreme explorations of the genre spectrum as well as through blurring digital and analog media. Through a haunting combination of voice and synthesis, she organically traverses from soft to brutal forms of electronic music. Alyana’s ritualistic live performance practice is a culmination of blood, rave, and energy. Their music aims to decolonize and liberate, exploring manifestations of love, freedom, and bliss from bodily to astral planes. Alyana Cabral has provided score for Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien’s film Langit Lupa.
Enzo Camacho (*1985, Philippines) and Ami Lien (*1987, USA) are an artist duo based between New York and Berlin. They have had solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Freiburg (2018); and Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2018). Their work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2022); the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2021); the 5th New Museum Triennial, New York (2021); the 39th EVA International, Limerick (2021); Manifesta 13, Marseille (2020); the Drawing Center, New York (2020); the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei (2019); the Brunei Gallery, SOAS University of London (2019); the NTU Center for Contemporary Art, Singapore (2018); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2017); Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok (2017); and Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila (2009). In 2023, they were the recipients of the Gold Art Prize, and they are currently Senior Fellows at the Lunder Institute of American Art at Colby College.
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung is a writer, cultural worker, and founding editor of 'Decolonial Hacker'. In 2023, he was the Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow at Whitechapel Gallery, London, where he curated the exhibition 'Anna Mendelssohn: Speak, Poetess'. Eugene has been a curator-in-residence at Delfina Foundation, and was previously part of the curatorial and public program teams at the Julia Stoschek Foundation and 'documenta fifteen', respectively. His writing has appeared in e-flux Criticism, Third Text, ArtReview, Griffith Review, Art+Australia, and more. In 2021, he won the International Award for Art Criticism (IAAC). Eugene holds degrees in art history, gender studies, and law from the University of Sydney.
Donna Miranda (b. 1979) and Angelo V. Suarez (b. 1984) are activists who volunteer for the Federation of Agricultural Workers (Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura, UMA). As artists, they work at the intersection of choreography and poetry with focus on their materiality and the conditions of their production. Trained as a dancer, Miranda is preoccupied with how movement is written; conversely, trained as a poet, Suarez is preoccupied with how text is produced by movement. Miranda and Suarez are co-founders of Artists’ Alliance for Genuine Agrarian Reform and Rural Development
Lisa Ito-Tapang (b. 1980, Manila) is a cultural worker, writer, and independent curator based in Quezon City. She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Theory, College of Fine Arts (UPCFA) at the University of the Philippines Diliman, where she has been teaching art history, theory, and criticism as a faculty member since 2012. Her research, creative, and curatorial interests explore intersections between art practice, socio-political engagement, and ecology. She is the Secretary-General of the Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP), an organization of progressive artists founded in 1983.
(Sama-samang Artista Para sa Kilusang Agrayo, SAKA), a network of peasant advocates supporting the Philippine peasant struggle for land, food, justice and peace. In 2022, they along with 81 others were assaulted and illegally arrested by police on fabricated charges for supporting farmers asserting their right to land. It was the biggest mass arrest since the toppling of the Marcos Sr. dictatorship in 1986.