Twelve green videos are now showing at the Ayala Museum. One video gives a sneak peek of a woman’s exposed chest as it jingles and dangles in a room with a shifting sense of gravity. This isn’t pornography, but if you want environmental porn flicks—the kind that will turn you on to being green-minded—there’s only one destination.
Go see the current exhibition of 12 videos, which are art films on the environment and global weather changes, collectively titled Unwetter/Thunderstorm. The exhibit is on view until May 29 at the main gallery of the Ayala Museum. The show is an initiative of the Goethe-Institut of the Embassy of Germany, and is sponsored by Sony Philippines and the Ayala Foundation.
Twelve art short
Mounted on flat Sony HD TVs, museum-goers may view a panoply of shorts, such as Secret Life (USA, 2008) by Reynold Reynolds. Secret Life is a videography of the female form as it experiences gravitational dislocation, likewise a metaphor for migration within a dwindling world. The green video delivers a message of warning. The female montage is cut by a segue of growing plant forms that slither into space. It’s clearly a game of survival.
3Ster (Germany, 2002), by Michael Sailstorfer and Jurgen Heinert, is a video on the day in the life and death of a wood cabin consumed bit by bit by its own infernal fireplace. At the end of the day the dwelling place lays barren with its internal warmth exposed to the outer cold. All that’s left is the chimney and the prophecy that the same autocannibalism will happen to the planet.
Meanwhile, Flujo (Chile, 2010), by Gianfranco Foschino, is a documentary of a melting Chilean glacier tragically dripping its frozen remains into a beautiful, but dwindling, waterfall. Ice that has not been exposed to the outside air for thousands of years now meets a melting point. Water dribbles to extinction.
Art for advocacy’s sake
SAID Ayala Foundation’s Bill Luz: “These videos are not normally the topic for Ayala Museum, but this is art for advocacy’s sake.” He said the Ayala Museum is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
Richard Künzel, director of the Goethe-Institut, averred, “This is just a sample of the many things we have in store at the Goethe-Institut.”
He announced that the German cultural office will donate to the Philippine National Historical Commission newly restored copies of Jose Rizal’s first editions of Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo this year.
The donations will mark the 150th birthday anniversary of Rizal, the Philippine national hero installed during the American occupation of the Philippines which occurred after the archipelago had announced independence from Spain. Rizal had a sojourn in Heidelberg, Germany, in the late 19th century before his return and execution by Spain in Manila’s Bagumbayan, since renamed Luneta Park. In line with the Rizal manuscript donation, Künzel said that commemorative stamps celebrating this year’s events will be issued by PhilPost, the official Philippine postal service. Künzel hinted that four stamps will bear the following motifs: the Rizal statue in Heidelberg, Germany; the house of the Protestant pastor where Rizal stayed in Heidelberg; the water fountain in Heidelberg’s Rizal Park; and the logo of the 50th year anniversary of Goethe-Institut in the Philippines.
Goethe-Institut Philippines is proud to celebrate its half a century’s existence this year.
But contrary to convention, later revisionist historians claim the revolutionary Andres Bonifacio is the true national hero of the Philippines. They said Rizal was made a hero by the Americans, who wanted the Filipinos to be reactionaries. These historians claim Rizal did not want outright revolution, but Philippine representation in the Spanish Cortes. The historians want to celebrate Bonifacio who, according to them, stands for true revolution against foreign dominating powers.
