Stephanie Comilang & Simon Speiser: Piña, Why Is The Sky Blue?

About

Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? features footage shot in the Philippines and Ecuador, where Comilang and Speiser, respectively, have family histories. Its video component includes interviews with activists and healers from local organizations such as the Indigenous feminist collective Cyber Amazonas in Puyo, and Las Martinas de Piedras Negras in Quito, both in Ecuador; as well as with a shaman or Babaylan, in Palawan, Philippines. These are interspersed with footage of agricultural landscapes, abandoned buildings amid lush forests, and documentation of ritual activities carried out by the interviewees. Through an emphasis on matriarchal lineages and their modes of knowledge transmission, the artists consider how precolonial ways of being have survived into the present in spite of their ongoing violent oppression. 

The spirit Piña remains invisible in the video, but they speak in voiceover over drone footage, which conjures their disembodied presence. “I am here for you,” they say. “Made out of all of you. Made out of your lost world. When all was being destroyed. And it was all burning. Somehow I survived. And now you’ve found me.” In the VR component, by contrast, Piña can be seen in human form. Initially viewers see Piña carrying out everyday activities, before they enter Piña’s inner world, a fragmentary rendered dreamscape made up of all the data transmitted to them.

In addition to the installation, the exhibition features textile collages made of woven pineapple-cloth swatches sewn together by hand. One of the first commodities from the so-called New World, pineapple (piña) was introduced to the Philippines by Spanish colonialists, where it was grown for the European luxury market as well as used locally as food and fiber. On the individual squares, Comilang and Speiser have 3D-printed an amalgamation of traditional Ecuadorian and Filipino patterns along with new designs generated either by the artists or by a self-learning algorithm. Via the resulting amalgam of various patterns, techniques, and traditions, the material becomes a carrier of information, one that connects the physical and virtual worlds as well as the past and present.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring an interview between the artists and curator Lisa Long and an essay by London-based writer Alex Quicho.

Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? is part of a new initiative at JSC Berlin: a dedicated space for the presentation of a recent acquisition of work by emerging artists. Supported by Team Global.