Neatly broken shards

Martha Atienza

MANILA, Philippines - When it comes to capturing a certain culture’s story through film, the term “documentary” most often comes to mind. Yet in Martha Atienza’s work Gilubong Akon Pusod sa Dagat (My Navel is Buried Under the Sea), there is a somewhat different approach; it gently hovers above the realm of video art, casting a shadow over the line between the two that makes any attempt to categorize irrelevant. While the power of a documentary to incite change in the viewer (or society for that matter) often stems from an attempt to convince, video art does so through the sheer experience it shares and not necessarily the content it is composed of. Gilubong Akon Pusod sa Dagat tells the story of the seafarers and fishermen of Bantayan Island through Atienza’s lens — but in this writer’s opinion, not necessarily her eyes, if you know what I mean. In the absence of a thesis lies its power. It’s an intimate experience with strangers, projected onto three screens side by side, masterfully synchronized like a visual orchestra. The community project took over a year to complete, made by the artist in close collaboration with the people it was primarily made for.

Patty Eustaquio

Martha Atienza, “Gilubong Akon Pusod sa Dagat (My Navel is Buried Under the Sea),” 2012

An interesting thing about Patricia Eustaquio’s practice is how she thinks in terms of exhibitions as a whole experience, as opposed to a set of themed artworks that make up a body of work. It is even subtly obvious in her treatment of technique as she explores the dynamics between aesthetics and our personal relationships with materials/objects. In her exhibition “Cloud Country” (which shares its name with a previous work based on Sylvia Plath’s “Two Campers in Cloud Country” exhibited at the Ateneo Art Gallery 2011), she seeks to emphasize a personal notion of “fabricated reality,” a dream state she refers to as “cloud country.” Familiar organic objects are rendered in uncustomary materials such as in the sculptural piece “Strange Fruit,” where the seeds and fruit of an atis tree are cast in glorious brass. “100,000 Years” is a triptych composed of a piece of fossilized wood that looks like a rock and two almost exact copies of it, between each of them an air of mystery and false “eureka” moments brought about by naiveté familiarity. It is within these gaps that we are given the best insight to what Eustaquio is truly trying to explore. In the stream of consciousness, there are thoughts, there are memories, and there is cloud country.