In this lecture, collaborating artists and activists Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien will speak about their recent touring solo exhibition Offerings for Escalante, which traveled from 2023–2024 to Para Site, Hong Kong; CCA Berlin; the Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow (as part of the Glasgow International) and MoMA PS1, New York. The centerpiece of the exhibition was an hour-long experimental documentary titled Langit Lupa (Heaven Earth), which centers survivor testimonies of a political massacre that took place on a sugarcane plantation island in the Philippines in 1985, when state-backed paramilitary troops open fired upon a mass protest. The artists will speak about the process of making the film and the exhibition, as well as their long-term, ongoing engagement with Negros Island, where the massacre took place. They will share how their research on the Filipino agrarian struggle had a transformative impact on their practice, pushing them to rethink the relationship between art and politics in more concrete terms.

Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien are artists, writers, and activists from the Philippines and the United States. Together, they have a collaborative practice that attends to colonial and imperial histories and presents, while gesturing towards an undergrowth of resistant practices, particularly in the context of the Philippines. They have had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York (2024); Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow (2024); Center for Contemporary Arts Berlin (2024); Para Site, Hong Kong (2023); Kunstverein Freiburg (2018) and the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2018). Their work has been shown in group exhibitions at the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2021); the 5th New Museum Triennial, New York (2021); Manifesta 13, Marseille (2020); the Brunei Gallery, SOAS University of London (2019); the NTU Center for Contemporary Art, Singapore (2018). From 2023–24, they were Senior Fellows at the Lunder Institute of American Art at Colby College.

The screening of Langit Lupa (Heaven Earth) by Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien (2023, 56 minutes) will take place on Monday. This will be followed by a lecture in English on Tuesday.