Isola Tong
Ark
2021
Steel structure, lightbox
Variable dimensions
Working at the intersection of architecture and visual art, Isola Tong’s practice looks at the intimacies of ecologies and human and nonhuman agencies. For the exhibition, Tong presents a newly commissioned outdoor installation that uses the Philippines as an entry point to elaborate on the exhibition’s historical conjunctures. In 1976, then President Ferdinand Marcos requested the importation of safari animals from Kenya to Calauit in Palawan, an island province south of Manila. In order to make space for the proposed safari, some 250 Tagbanua families, indigineous people of the island, were relocated to Halsey Island, a former leper colony. Tong’s work for the exhibition situates this event within the context of the Marcosian investments on the grandiose and the monumental and the tropes of the tropics as elaborated by a number of blaxploitation narratives in the 1970s. For this work, Tong uses the image of the ark in Judeo-Christian myth as a metaphor for the self-deification of the Marcoses in order to foreground “the biopolitical and ecological implications of power in the migration, extinction, and dispossession of biologies, ultimately reshaping and altering ecosystems.” A rectangular structure divided into two sections, the Cage and the Cave, comprises the work. A foyer made out of chain link mesh, the Cage, allows spectators from outside to see the people entering the installation, unsettling the dynamics of gazing. Into the inner sanctum, the Cave, the artist documents herself as the deer-woman, an homage to the 1972 blaxploitation film The Twilight People. The film narrates the story of a mad scientist who attempts to create a super race by combining human and animal DNA, creating human-animal hybrids. For the artist: “The giraffe-woman signals the juncture of human and animal agencies exploited by the state power. Cells and Cages are recurring symbols in science fiction, representing anthropocentrism, human hubris, and apathy in the control and manipulation of nature through unethical experiments. The ark also hearkens back to the imposing brutalist structures built by the Marcoses, an architectural exercise of monumentalizing and reifying their reign.”
Isola Tong (Libra, Fire Rabbit, Manila, Philippines) is a Filipinx trans-womxn artist, architect, researcher, and educator engaging the intersection of autochthonous queerness and nature through performance, installation, print, painting, and moving image to disrupt and explore the tensions in the binarized understandings of nature and culture. She comes from a line of Babaylan or Filipinx shamans in the central region of the Philippine archipelago. Isola’s ongoing artistic research involves queer cultures embedded in indigenous shamanistic histories, its frictions with postcolonial realities, and the visualizations of ecology in human and nonhuman encounters. In her developing practice, the preternatural class of the spiritual Babaylan becomes one of her points of reference, whose walk of life and duties embody healing and communing with nature and spirits, especially noted in a pre-colonial Philippines. In pondering this shamanist identity as a being, orientation, vocation, and methodology, Tong seeks to study the dimensions and potentialities of human-nature relationalities, its connectedness and social interstices foregrounded in the ritualistic, and communal care of ourselves, and our ecology. She has shown in Post-Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, South Korea; Sami Center for Contemporary Art, Tromso, Norway; A+ Contemporary Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is currently an MFA candidate at the UC Santa Cruz, Environmental Art and Social Practice program.
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