A Conversation with Ami Lien and Enzo Camacho
Ami Lien & Enzo Camacho. Still from Langit Lupa. 2023. High-definition video (color, sound). 56 mins, 21 seconds. Courtesy the artists and 47 Canal, New York.
The Taiwanese American artist Ami Lien and the Filipino artist Enzo Camacho started collaborating while in university. Their first exhibition after graduating from Harvard was in Manila (Philippines) in 2009. As someone who had grappled with identity questions growing up, Lien longed to spend more time in Asia to reconnect with the continent’s history. But when in Manila, it was hard to ignore the effects of colonialism and the ongoing US imperialistic practices—“[there was a lot of] faulty infrastructure, land oligarchy, and class division in the city; it was a very fractured, kind of intense place,” she remembers.
However, during this trip, they also encountered a powerful and inspiring form of resistance from the area's cultural workers. “Even for myself, having grown up there, it was quite eye-opening,” says Camacho. “It just shifted a lot inside me,” Lien adds. “What kind of work should we be developing? It felt like our practice became political from the get-go.” From that moment, Lien said, “a seed had been planted.”
Portrait of Ami Lien and Enzo Camacho. Photo: Diana Pfammatter.
Later, Camacho moved back to the Philippines, while Lien moved to New York. For several years, they worked together on projects in the distance, chasing opportunities wherever they arose, but returning to the Philippines was always a constant. They knew they wanted to create a project that showcased the power of the social and cultural movement happening in the country.
At the end of last year, Enzo and Ami landed at MoMA PS1 in Queens, NY, with a show that marks their first major US exhibition. At the center of it is the Philippines and the interconnected issues of land justice and anti-imperialist resistance in the country. In Offerings for Escalante, the duo created groupings of handmade paperwork using local vegetal fibers that form landscape drawings on Philippine folklore.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the newly commissioned documentary Langit Lupa (which can be translated as “Heaven Earth”). This hour-long film focuses on the state repression in the region of Negros. Enzo and Ami told Mariado Martínez Pérez how this documentary came to life.
MARIADO MARTÍNEZ PÉREZ: The Escalante Massacre took place in Negros in 1985. This protest for better living and working conditions under the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos turned into the killing of at least 20 of the protestors. In the film, you narrate the past tragedy and also take it to the present day, where there are still incidents of political violence. Why did you decide to localize your film in this region?
AMI LIEN: Actually, Enzo invited me to Negros for a different project. It’s where his mom’s side of the family is from. We were going to see this mural of Alfonso Ossorio, which is in this modernist church, at a complex for sugar factory workers. So, we started reading the mural against the backdrop of the plantation system and how it is connected with social conflict and labor exploitation. Then, in 2018, there was another massacre that happened to a group of families that were organizing themselves against land occupation. So we couldn’t look away from the situation.
MMP: Were you there when that happened?
AL: We were not exactly there when it happened, but we were already involved with the community, and it was related to everything that we were learning about. Then, during the pandemic, we couldn’t travel to the Philippines, and we wanted to return with a project that would highlight and bring attention to these injustices within the plantation system in Negros. But then it was too hard to talk about something that recent because things were and are still very violent. So we ended up focusing on the past, on the story of the Escalante massacre of 1985, as it was a bit safer to have that distance. But in speaking about this historical event, we wanted to underscore that things haven’t changed. We wanted to show that problems remain the same.
MMP: Is that why there’s no archival content in the film?
AL: Yes, in producing this film, we decided not to include any archival footage because we wanted to share the story through present images that we filmed while we were there.
Ami Lien and Enzo Camacho. Decomposition Animation. 2023. 16mm Film (color, silent). 50 sec. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century. Photo: Steven Paneccasio.
MMP: I guess we get that “archival part” through the voices of the testimonies and the journalists narrating what happened. But even those voices are masked behind phytograms (an image made using plants and photographic emulsion to create a chemical reaction. The process combines printmaking and filmmaking). Was that an artistic decision, or did the people giving testimonials ask for their faces not to be shown?
ENZO CAMACHO: This decision came because one of the first people we interviewed expressed discomfort about showing her face for the film. And then we just decided to remove all faces. However, it opened up other opportunities to think about how to convey these stories using this idea of abstract footage. We started experimenting with a 16-millimeter film, getting into these analog processes that had always been an interest of ours.
We see the story of the massacre as part of a larger history of the violence that has been done to the land and landscape, so the phytograms made sense. We used local plants to make them. In a way these plants have also been witnesses of the history of that land.
MMP: Was it difficult to get people to tell their stories?
EC: It was an interesting experience for us. There was an urgency, not only on our part but in the left-wing movement in the Philippines, to really try and grasp how something like that could happen. Many activists and cultural workers are thinking more about how the past is being told, narrated, and kept.
I timed my visit so that I could be in for the anniversary of the massacre on September 20th. I arrived on the island a few days before and went to Escalante to get in touch with a few people I had made contact with. There was no real agenda; it was just to make contacts and meet people. But when I got there, I got to meet the survivors. One of them approached me and said she heard I was making a film and that she could gather a few other survivors. I think there was a desire from survivors to tell the story because they are also organizers.
They are still trying to seek justice for what happened to them. I think they also had a political interest in what this story meant and the importance of sharing it.
Ami Lien and Enzo Camacho. Bird, 2020. Vegetable fibers. Courtesy the artists and 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Joerg Lohse.
MMP: There is a group of kids acting and, in a way, carrying the weight of the film. From playing at the plantation fields to the final offering they perform, they are the ones leading the way through the story. How was it working with them? Are they personally connected with the story?
AL: We lived in this fishing village very close to Escalante because we felt the folks there were a bit more “accessible.” There’s an activist-run cultural center, so they were already open to artistic people visiting their home. But just to preface, it is very hard to live in a plantation community because it is all private property that is heavily militarily guarded. Probably each landowner has their own security, like a militia of sorts, so if you are running around as an artist knocking on their door, they are not going to like it.
Living in these coastal neighborhoods made us realize how the plantation system molds, structures, and oppresses all kinds of life there. Fishing is super precarious now that the sea has become industrialized, and to make ends meet, they also need to work part-time in the haciendas. In the past, they could have areas of land to farm and grow their own food, but because the land has been so privatized and taken away from people, the resources are really limited.
Adding to Enzo’s story about how we met some of the interviewees, two were actually the grandparents of one of the kids in the film. We realized after a while that in this community, everyone had been affected by the Escalante massacre. We were doing these art workshops with the kids in this village and shared our intention to make this film with the families. And they were like, “Oh, my grandparents are also survivors,” or “Oh, my grandparents organized the fisherfolk sector for protests.” I think the families saw the social value of making this movie.
Coincidentally, it turned out that the cemetery where we shot the final offering scene was just down the street from where we were living, and all the families who were our neighbors go there; their ancestors are buried there. It’s a cemetery of local workers in the middle of a plantation. So it was somehow serendipitous that everyone already had so much familiarity with this place—this sort of sanctuary. It is a place that escapes the difficult social regime, like a jungle in that area, with beautiful old trees. The kids felt very comfortable playing on top of those gravestones. It's not a scary place for them.
EC: We were intentional about the role of kids in the film. You describe them as almost “guiding” the viewer, which is accurate with what we were trying to do. They are interesting guides because they are never really identified in the film. This decision was inspired by a powerful statement from the mother of Robena, the youngest victim of the massacre. Her interview comes at the end of the film, as she describes the death of her child: “We are seeking justice, not just for my child, but for all of our children.” That line stuck with us because this personal experience of loss and grief suddenly opens up into a collective experience. There’s a real political meaning. For us, the way these children guide the viewer through the film without being anchored or identified stands for the representation of all children.
Ami Lien and Enzo Camacho. Langit Lupa. 2023. Video (color, sound). 56:21 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century. Photo: Steven Panecassio.
MMP: What was the reaction when the people involved watched the film?
AL: We organized different screenings. The most important one was with the fishing village community. We developed a very intimate relationship with the kids and the families who had performed in the film. There was this sense of ownership and involvement in the construction of the documentary. Some of the older kids were really moved by it. Even though this story is part of their history, it doesn't necessarily get passed on due to disinformation, polarization, and the violence that resistant movements have to deal with. Through the screenings, we’ve seen how people feel more encouraged to share their stories.
Offerings for Escalante is on view at MoMA PS1 until February 17th, 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
