Stephanie Comilang: Search for Life

Search for Life, by Filipino-Canadian artist Stephanie Comilang (Toronto, 1980), is a new exhibition presented by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary as part of its program at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum. Curated by Chus Martínez, this is the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Spain and is carried out in collaboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation.

Comilang’s work juxtaposes temporality, geography, and technology into narratives in which the future and past become aligned, addressing diasporas, generations, survival, violence, and desire. Comilang’s films, which she calls “science fiction documentaries,” are a combination of chronicle and illusion, with stories that inhabit multiple voices and perspectives that aim to describe how culture and society are related to the cornerstones that shape our globalised world, namely mobility, capital, and labor.

Search for Life is a totalising large-scale film and textile installation. The film is displayed on a large digital screen and a projection that face one another, tracing shipping routes used by Spanish conquistadors after the colonisation of the Philippines. The two projections constitute one film that brings to the screen the extraordinary scope of today’s global maritime cargo movements, as well as the vital role of Filipino seafarers. The stories are told by interwoven voices of various figures, including the historian Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos; Philippine butterfly specialist Aster T. Badon; Michael John Díaz and painter Joar Songcuya, both Filipino seafarers; a boy named Simón from Michoacán, Mexico; and, of course, the voice of the monarch butterfly. In the artist’s words: “This project includes a multitude of intertwined stories, timelines, and characters, both human and non-human, which narrate different migratory experiences and the connections inherent to them.”

Alongside the film, the exhibition shows a number of textile creations made of pineapple fiber, traditionally used for local fabric production after this fruit was introduced to the archipelago by the Spaniards. The embroideries allude to the mythical Manila shawl and, with them, the Spanish colonial past. They fill the room with images of the natural world, such as flowers from potato and coffee plants, vanilla, and other species imported by the Spaniards, re-interpreted through the eyes of the butterflies.