Stephanie Comilang & Simon Speiser: Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? (2022), still. 360-degree video, virtual reality headset, color, sound, 16"18. Courtesy the artists.
Sunday, 17 September 2023, 19:00 (CET)
We welcome you to join us for an online screening of the film Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? by the artists Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser.
19.00 – 19.20: Introduction conversation: the artists with curator Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen
19.20 – 19.50: Film screening of Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? (2022)
19.50 – 20.00: Q&A
Click here to join the conversation via Zoom!
The work Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? (2022) is structured around an elegant spirit, Piña, named after the Spanish and Tagalog word for pineapple, a fruit first introduced to the Philippines in the seventeenth century by Spanish colonizers who considered it a symbol of luxury. In the distant future, Piña is an omniscient AI-guide that holds and transmits matrilineal knowledge by first receiving information, or “data,” uploaded from knowledge-keepers who preserve spiritual and ecological practices, despite the violence of colonization. In the video, Piña’s presence is felt but unseen, as we meet real-world healers and activists. Among them are Kankwana Canelos and Rupay Gualinga of Ciber Amazonas, a group of Indigenous activists in Puyo, Ecuador, who discuss their work forming feminist alliances across the Amazon through radio broadcasting. In an emotionally heightened interview, Janet Dolera, a Babaylan (spiritual medium) and community leader in the Philippines, discusses how she discovered her spiritual calling and meditates on what it means to work as a healer. And Alba Pavón, an Afro-Ecuadorian organizer of the Black Women’s Movement in Pichincha, Ecuador, offers detailed knowledge of plants and healing botanicals while also addressing the history of forced migration of Black peoples into Indigenous communities.
The event is in connection to Kunsthall Trondheim’s current exhibition A Body of Memory (from neurons to the sea). The exhibition is supported by Italian Culture Institute/Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Berliner Festspiele and Arts Council Norway.
–––––––
Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at Tate Modern, Hamburger Bahnhof, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Julia Stoschek Collection, and Haus der Kunst. She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.
Simon Speiser is an artist who conjures fictional concepts that merge nature with technology. Placing a variety of media and disciplines in dialogue with one another—ranging from writing, sculpture, and printing to video and VR installations—Speiser’s work expands the possibilities between art and science fiction. He has exhibited at the Tate Modern, Julia Stoschek Collection, Frankfurter Kunstverein among others.