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Meeting Yesterday in Paradise: Profile of Stephanie Comilang
Portrait of STEPHANIE COMILANG. Photo by Alex Madrid. Courtesy the artist.
At the end of a short trip to Vancouver, having failed to catch exhibitions at two other galleries (alas, summer hours), I trailed into Artspeak, a bit defeated but grateful to see a fortress of gray and crimson pillows on the carpeted floor. A two-channel video installation was being looped on a tall white wall, bifurcated by a wide obtuse angle to accommodate the split screen. I reclined and began to watch Stephanie Comilang’s Yesterday, In the Years 1886 and 2017 (2017), a 10-minute film commissioned by the gallery’s director Bopha Chhay. Over a shimmering electronic track by NaEE Roberts (also known as Sandra Mujinga) and Elysia Crampton, with whom Comilang has worked previously, a high-pitched, disembodied voice recited a poem in Tagalog. I read the subtitles in English.
Comilang is a Filipina-Canadian filmmaker who works primarily between Toronto and Berlin. However, her research interests in migratory patterns and communication have taken her to far-flung locales that weave together points of her own personal history. Her 2016 work Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come To Me, Paradise) is a self-described “science fiction documentary” that chronicles the lives of three Filipina domestic workers—Irish May Salinas, Lyra Ancheta Torbela and Romylyn Presto Sampaga—in Hong Kong. The titular Paradise is the drone camera, voiced by Comilang’s mother, who migrated to Canada in the 1970s. In addition to grabbing a wider shot at a higher angle, Paradise also acted as a feminized all-seeing eye that hovers above the city, creating and sustaining dialogue with the other protagonists. Comilang says, “The film is about how people are forced to move around the world because of circumstances in their own country that they can’t really avoid. The reasons behind why people move and why they’re forced to move, and then what happens when they’re in the new country, how they adapt to or affect it.”
Installation view of STEPHANIE COMILANG’s Yesterday, In the Years 1886 and 2017, 2017, two-channel HD video with sound: 9 min 48 sec, looped, at Artspeak, Vancouver, 2017. Photo by Dennis Ha. Courtesy the artist.
Comilang employs the same device in Yesterday, and the narrator is a similar ghost traversing past, present and future. The ghost recites a poem that ties together the stories of José Rizal (1861–1896), a doctor and nationalist hero who incited political revolution in the Philippines after studying in Germany, and Lourdes Lareza Müller, a former librarian at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Comilang appropriated Rizal’s writing and combined it with her own, while utilizing a poembot, a software application that grafts words together to produce a wholly new text. Her mother again helped her to smooth out the Tagalog to make the language cohere.
Curious to learn more about the currents of Philippine-German migration, Comilang stumbled across an article on Müller: “Meet Berlin’s Filipino Grandmama.” Having resided in Germany for almost 50 years and still active as a community elder, Müller had seen several generations of immigrants who had made the arduous journey that she had once embarked on. Comilang, who had been aware of Rizal’s history prior, began seeing a “psycho-spiritual” connection between Rizal and Müller after becoming acquainted with the librarian:
“I imagined her walking through the streets as the only brown woman and how she must have felt: indifferent, scared, empowered, beautiful. . . I thought about the connections that all migrants have; how Rizal must have felt the same way walking down the street. How these two people share so much history. How these two people are both human archives. And how they’re spiritually connected to all other people who share the same experience, especially those who come from the same place.”
The viewer follows the camera between the Philippines and Germany: to Heidelberg, where Rizal studied ophthalmology, and nearby Wilhelmsfeld, where he resided and completed the novel Noli Me Tángere (1887). A bronze statue of Rizal was erected in a namesake park that opened in 1978, thanks to efforts by the Philippine-German Association in Mainz and Müller—as Comilang would later discover. Yesterday captures the sweetly pastoral landscape of the peaceful area, which is about an hour-and-a-half from Frankfurt, and filmed at the national nature preserve Kühkopf-Knoblochsaue (Cowhead Garlic Meadow), as well as the arts district of Neukölln and a construction site in Berlin. She recorded videos on her cell phone while on holiday with her family from the island of Bohol in the Philippines.
STEPHANIE COMILANG, film still from Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise), 2016, video: 25 min 46 sec. Music by Why Be, Sky H1 and Elysia Crampton. Cinematography by Iris Ng. Courtesy the artist.
STEPHANIE COMILANG, film still from Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise), 2016, video: 25 min 46 sec. Music by Why Be, Sky H1 and Elysia Crampton. Cinematography by Iris Ng. Courtesy the artist.
There’s an element of time travel in Comilang’s films, which are altered by and filtered through a deft manipulation of contemporary technologies that allow the artist and her audience to consider the evolution of our communications in a so-called globalized, postcolonial framework. We can feed translations through digital interfaces that are fairly technically accurate and attempt conversations through third-party interlocutors, but those who speak and embody a language on a regular basis shape its timbre and rhythm. What does it mean when our “native tongues” slip away? Comilang mentioned her frustration with her inability to speak fluent Tagalog, tracing it to “a colonial mentality that’s been passed down. The North American children of Filipino immigrant parents who can understand Tagalog but not speak it. The narrative is so common it makes me sick.”
At the moment, Comilang is undertaking a residency with the Tropical Futures Institute, a newly launched arts initiative that focuses on projects in Southeast Asia. The institute is currently based in Cebu, where Comilang has been researching the linguistic history of the Eskaya tribe. The Eskayan language is phonetically unlike the Cebuano or Tagalog spoken in the region, which evidently became so during the colonial period when tribe members encoded and encrypted the language and script to protect it from the Spaniards. Spoken by approximately 500 people today, Eskayan is an electrifying example of an anti-colonial language that morphed quickly to prevent its violent destruction. In addition to an exhibition of previous work, Comilang will share and present findings in the fall from her research in the region.