Within the immigrant experience, the porousness of home is well understood. Home can exist however and wherever one so recognizes it. How To Make A Painting From Memory works with the emancipated spirit of the variable home, grounding ideas of the aether-place into the architectural structure of a house and the physical strength capable of bearing its weight.
—Philip Leonard Ocampo, "I. Logic surging through the Aether"
Home and community figure prominently in Stephanie Comilang's composite installation of sculpture, still and moving images; communal architectures—whether built structures or the interdependency of people in place—are malleable, nomadic containers of memory and belonging. Grounded in a familiar Filipino image of the Bayanihan (men carrying wooden nipa, referencing the spirit of cooperation and being in-community), Thai female migrant storytellers in an adjacent film, whose vocalized memories of their family homes are also rendered as 3D-printed spirit houses, the exhibition elucidates concepts of communal unity, cooperation and the protective spirit of place as modes of diasporic home-making, reciprocity, trust and relationality.
For more information read the two-part, mirrored essay I. Logic surging through the Aether II. Spirits flowing through the Circuit, by artist and arts facilitator Philip Leonard Ocampo.
Listen to a special edition podcast conversation between Stephanie Comilang and Toronto based curator and writer Heather Canlas Rigg on G44 Digital.
Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working in 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 the 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.
