Online Event l General Public
To register, email us at mcad@benilde.edu.ph
Issues of climate change, capitalism and marine extraction among others are approached from the medium of ocean, reflecting an anxiety situated within the ephemeral nationalistic boundaries of Southeast Asia.
Our screenings for the month of June to July is curated by Toby Wu. Wu is a graduate student at the University of Chicago whose interest is in documentary production, Asian film and festivals, and modern and contemporary Southeast Asian Art.
The films will be available for viewing from 7 June to 11 July 2021.
SCHEDULE
June 7-13 : Towards the Complex – For The Courageous, The Curious and The Cowards
June 14-20 : Tungkung Langit
June 21-27: Letter To The Sea
June 28-July 3: Gilubong ang Akong Pusod sa Dagat (My Navel is Buried in the Sea)
July 4- 11: Sea State 6: Phase 1
View the images below for information on each individual film or download text here.
This program explores the aesthetic dimensions of waterscapes, that not only represents or visualises natural ecologies, contested environments and human subjectivity, but mediates the narratives and phenomenological experiences of being in water. Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati have noted a historical interest and correlation between water cosmologies and their bearings socio-political structures in neighbouring South Asia, seen in writings from scholars from Ananda Coomaraswamy to John Irwin.
Yet, such art historical precedents do not suggest why Southeast Asian artists have shown an interest in filming in the seascapes. Their foray into the interstitial spaces of water bodies are not akin to other anthropocenic concerns of climate change, though they bear affinities to the economic perspectives of oceans seen in Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1989-95). Why must these stories be told through the water? What is the artistic labour of unearthing histories in the water?
Melody Jue sees this emergence of an “ocean humanities” as not just an interest in the contents or what passes through these waters, but rather a displacement of one’s “normative environment of interpretation” into the alienating, non-human medium of the ocean. Jue asks—how can we cultivate a certain humility, to approach our histories from an alternative embodied point of view found in wild blue media? How do we orient ourselves in the water and think of it’s interface, its body as knowledge, and what is inscribed in and through it?
While blue media does not purely serve as an index for the anthropocene experienced by humans on land, it confronts the viewer with an objective sense of our mortality. Where else can we go when we run out of land? This program reflects upon the reality of many Southeast Asian nations dependent on the waters that surround them, both the unnegotiable traumas of the past and the anxieties towards futurity.
The program also explores the notion of the underwater museum, and how artists seek to investigate, memorialise and confront trauma that cannot be spoken of or seen above water. Yet, the sea is no passive or totalising institution; its waters destabilise any notion of preservation, and calls for the spectator to submerge themselves in order to bear witness to its moment of articulation. Perhaps it is only through the sea that we can begin to understand the fraught commonalities within the imagine Southeast Asian region
