Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien: Langit Lupa, The Symposium

Active Cultures culminated Ami Lien and Enzo Camacho’s residency in Los Angeles with a second screening of Langit Lupa, followed by a symposium with the artists and invited guests Josen Masangkay Diaz, Joy Sales, and Lucy MSP Burns. Friends, comrades, and colleagues in neighboring universities, these participants’ intertwining research, writing and community-based activist collaborations both analyze and enact the Philippine liberation struggle as a trans-Pacific effort. The talks drew from histories of Philippine agrarian worker protests from Negros to California, as well as addressed the chilling resurgence of Martial Law-era authoritarianism in the Philippines, under the continuing pressures of US colonial and imperial influences. 

This program was part of a weekend long series of programs called Langit Lupa. For over a decade, Berlin and New York-based artists Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien have developed a multidisciplinary practice addressing geopolitical relations by attending to localized forms of dispossession, survival, and resistance, particularly in the context of the Philippines. Their current work pays particular attention to agricultural practices and the exploitation of land and labor in Negros, an island known for sugarcane production in the Philippines.