Curtains: a film in three parts asks toward the politics and ethics of the field of vision, especially it relates to geographies and events that appear distanced or apart from one's everyday reality.
A collaborative project by Los Angeles based artists, Camilo Ontiveros and Michelle Dizon, Curtains: a film in three parts is a cinematic encounter with time and space. It takes a filmic approach to the gallery installation and is concerned with the experience of duration and the act of looking itself.
The project is composed of three parts with text, photographs, and a curtain woven from burnt textile collected at the ruins of marketplace in Mindanao. Suggestions of disaster punctuate the exhibition with broken bottles, the carcass of a burnt dog, and fragments of textile that bear the traces of a fire. Yet, throughout the work these suggestions of disaster are consistently paired with images of anonymous windows, whose focus is not on the view outside but rather on the window itself.
Curtains: a film in three parts negotiates the distance between fragments from a site in ruins, and the windows of our private lives. This pairing, between disaster and window, occurs like a refrain in the project and through this juxtaposition, we begin to understand that the proposition made by Ontiveros and Dizon is not one that lays claim to knowledge or truth as is often the case with reportage of disaster. Instead, their project is interested in proposing the problem of the proximity between these windows and those worlds. The window set against the fragments of disaster comes to signify all of the ways lines are drawn to distinguish interior from exterior, self from other, us from them, or here from elsewhere.
Curtains: a film in three parts expands the field of vision to not only what we see, but also, to what we don't see. Instead of taking for granted the oft-assumed statement that vision is a window onto another world, they offer a curtain, and ask what might be seen by not seeing. By making the act of looking central to their project, Ontiveros and Dizon invite us to ask how the field of vision reflects upon the psychic lives and political subjectivities that each of us inhabit. They ask us to consider what it is that we see when a curtain is drawn.
On January 14, 2010, Looking South: Thoughts on Mindanao took place at the Vargas Museum. It was a discussion with scholars, activists, and artists who are dealing with the question of Mindanao. This event will o ffer an introduction to the work of researching, fi lmmaking, and organizing that each of the participants have been doing, and address the con uence of issues such as war, militarization, and globalization that pertain to the region.
Speakers:
Kiri Dalena is a visual artist and a filmmaker. She currently works and resides in
Quezon City, Philippines. She studied BS Human Ecology from the University
of the Philippines in Los Banos and 16 MM filmmaking at the Mowelfund Film
Institute. She is preparing for her second solo exhibition and currently does
volunteer work for a women's rights organization .
Herbert Docena is a writer and researcher who is currently a doctoral student
in Sociology at UC Berkeley. He holds a Bachelors of Science in Economics from
UP Diliman. He has published widely including co-editing The Anti-Development State:
Political Economy of Permanent Crisis in the Philippines, writing the report
entitled ‘At the Door of All the East’: The Philippines in United States Military
Strategy for Focus on the Global South, and contributed to the volume Mourir
Pour McDo en Irak.