With disparate views of the contemporary landscape, and land erodes into at Calle Wright, Manila stands on the uncomfortable precipice
These days, any attempt to imagine humanity’s future is likely to be a depressing exercise: there is little to look forward to. The effects of climate change and political and economic crises have left human destiny at a tipping point; the impacts of the internet, social media and artificial intelligence call into question humanity’s necessary significance. This two-artist show combining the work of Singaporean Fyerool Darma and Filipino Nice Buenaventura captures this uncomfortable precipice.
and land erodes into utilises Calle Wright’s space, a two-level townhouse, to allow for intimate pockets of viewing. At the entrance, Darma’s Screenshot 11-03-2023 at 03:03 PM (philhuat 2GO) (2023) installation, featuring collaborators rawanXberdenyut, LKS, Lé Luhur, interrupts a clean white wall with a scattering of seven amorphous black stickers and six small framed digital prints featuring colourful geometric patterns, similar to those that appear in computer delays and disruptions.
Perpendicular to Darma’s wall piece is Buenaventura’s Gaian Assembly XV (2023), a laser-engraved plywood sheet. Buenaventura took a map from Dean C. Worcester’s The Philippine Islands and Their People (1898), an American colonial documentation of the country, and reinterprets it using flowing shapes and vague representations of islands to do away with any sense of cartographic and mathematical precision. Cutting out the islands in the multiple-layered plywood, the work reveals different grain patterns, highlighting strata in the muted and unpainted material, perhaps alluding to the different characters in the archipelago. Border-making was always a defining point in the Philippines’ 350-year colonial history – with Spain, Britain, the United States and Japan creating and detailing its geographies. Now the nation is in an ongoing conflict with China, as the latter intrudes into the territorial waters of the West Philippine Sea. Buenaventura’s decolonial attempt at distorting Worcester’s colonial framing is a subtle interrogation of the idea of land, territories and borders.
A pair of video installations, one by each artist, offers a chance to contrast their works: Darma’s Poietics of Pantun/pantoum/tuntun/tanaga (2021–), featuring collaborators b*ntang786, berukera, jaleejalee, ToNewEntities, @sgmuseummemes, AIden and Lé Luhur from Autaspace on the ground level, and Buenaventura’s Rocks scattered by the last breaths of the Pacific (2023) on the first. Darma’s video plays out on a vertical HD screen, mimicking a gigantic smartphone or tablet, an effect enhanced by digital prints of blurred computer-screen composites and recreated screenshots on the wall, and an assemblage of real and epoxy resin phones to the side. Watching the videowork feels like walking into a digital realm in which multiple applications are open – reinterpretations of social-media sites Spotify, Zoom, YouTube, Google, TikTok and Facebook flash across the screen – overwhelming the viewer, as is the case in real life when spending time on a gadget. Online disruptions in the form of loading screens, advertisements and files failing to load interrupt the video itself, enhancing that real-life feel. Darma also leans into the uncanny, using robotic and artificial-looking people referencing the Malay verse form pantun and Filipino tanaga in their speech. The dreary and plastic feel of the videowork and installation appeal to the technological immersion of dreary contemporary culture.
Where Darma presents disconnectedness (in technologies designed for online socialisation), Buenaventura’s tranquil installation explores the connection between the Pacific islands. Rocks scattered… captures Pacific waters crashing on rocks – or bato/batu/patu and its numerous iterations in the archipelagos’ many languages. The video, culled from various sources, shows how the ocean acts, particularly during devastating typhoons. Pacific islands, linguistically and ideologically tied together, as with similar iterations of the word ‘rocks’, share vulnerabilities to climate change. They are at the forefront of rising ocean waters, higher water temperatures and increasingly powerful typhoons.
Bringing together such disparate views of the contemporary landscape – from Darma’s digital sphere and Buenaventura’s natural world – feels awkward and disjointed on the surface. Yet both parts constitute the reality of contemporary life. The Philippines, after all, had the world’s highest social-media-usage rate per citizen, per day, back in 2021. Away from the screen it is trapped on the frontline of some of the strongest typhoons in history. If this show is anything to go by, a tempestuous future awaits.
and land erodes into at Calle Wright, Manila, through 13 October
