CCA Berlin is pleased to present the exhibition Offerings for Escalante by artist duo Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien. The collaborative practice between the Filipino and Taiwanese American artists is driven by a sense of commitment and accountability to the communities they engage with. Their work often focuses on regional experiences of social struggle, exposing and articulating the interrelation between these localized points of tension and the dynamics of global capital. Drawing connections across time and place, they aim to confront the neocolonial exploitation and dispossession of lives in the name of property and profit.

The exhibition at CCA Berlin brings together a new body of works created between Berlin and the Philippines, marking the artists’ most ambitious project to date. Offerings for Escalante is the result of their many years of fieldwork on the plantation island of Negros—where Camacho’s mother is from—and their extensive investigation into the ongoing struggles for food sovereignty and land justice across borders. One initial entry point for this investigation was The Angry Christ—a queer Catholic mural by the Filipino American artist Alfonso Ossorio commissioned for a sugar worker’s chapel in Negros. The intense energy of the church mural and the way it at once reveals and unsettles its geographical and political context prompted Camacho and Lien to develop a unique visual language that spans across mediums, through which the social, the ecological, and the aesthetic coalesce. 

Centered on the experimental documentary film Langit Lupa (Heaven and Earth), the exhibition tends to different modes of commemoration and defiance in the wake of a violent massacre befallen the town of Escalante in 1985, when state affiliated paramilitary troops opened fire on peaceful protesters. As state brutality and oppression in the Philippines continues with the aim to uphold the plantation system, the present stands as a persistent residue of the historical subjugation of the land and its people under colonial and imperial rule. Through an assemblage of personal testimonials interwoven with footage of children at play, dreamlike sequences of flickering shapes drawn from the island’s plant life, Camacho and Lien seek to cultivate a space for attentive reflection on loss, memory, and the transformative potential of mourning. In the coastal village where they resided and worked for months, Camacho and Lien forged bonds with local children through games and paper-making workshops, later inviting them to play a central role in the film. Consciously rejecting the detached approach of traditional documentary making, Langit Lupa embodies an intimacy with the ebb and flow of community life.

The material-based approach employed in the film also extends to other works in the exhibition, including a 16mm animation created out of wet plant pulp, a kinetic installation that transforms the space by projecting light through translucent onion skins, as well as intricately crafted paper compositions evoking alternate imaginaries of the land. The artists make use of tactile play with foraged botanical materials as a central part of their research process, drawing knowledge from experimentation, out of which a kaleidoscopic aesthetic emerges. What Camacho and Lien wish to offer is a fertile plot to cultivate narratives that urgently speak out against the silencing of histories, where inexorable articulations of survival, resistance and renewal could flourish. The exhibition is an offering not only for Escalante, but also for other places in the world that are bearing witness to the enduring fight for land justice, to transnational movements against belligerent occupation, privatization and environmental destruction.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a public program that activates various dialogues, connections and alliances via different formats. The public program includes guided tours, a concert performance, a four-part screening program, a one-day symposium with activists and collectives from Berlin, Manila and beyond. Through these gatherings, Camacho and Lien intend to question the prevailing politics of remembrance. They seek to create space for continuous and collective learning, conversing and strategizing, in the face of our increasingly fractured and constricted cultural sphere.

More information please see The Works in Offerings for Escalante.