(My Heart Was Drowned in the Sea) / 2011 / Three-channel video projection / Artist: Martha Atienza

Pegged on the fact that her father was one of the first seafarers who had come out from Madrilejos in Bantayan island in Cebu, the artist drew from this facet of her personal biography and extended her work to explore the dynamics between fisherfolk, seafarers, and their families in this research-based art project that received a 2011 new media art grant from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). Illustrative of how an increasing number of artists are becoming inclined toward community-oriented work, Gilubong consists of abstracted narratives culled initially from a found trove of 18 mm footage shot by Atienza’s father in his early years as a ship captain. Propelled by a sense of paternal estrangement, Atienza sought to deepen her research by launching into a series of community discussions during which interviews with seafarers would be screened and to which people reacted and initiated sharing about the physical, emotional, and social demands of having families rent apart by having to work the seas. These sessions turned out to be frank exchanges punctuated with singing of neighborhood musicians. The artist’s first set of found images were further enriched with underwater footage shot by deep-sea fisherfolk using makeshift compressors as they set out to earn their keep off Bantayan’s waters. Atienza also shot footage on a cargo boat traversing Southeast Asia and on a Dutch riverboat traveling through Rotterdam, the city she presently works from and shuttles to between Manila and Bantayan.

Keen toward keeping herself accountable to her primary audience of seafarers/fisherfolk and their brood in Bantayan, Atienza premiered Gilubong on-site. These nightlong viewings of stories of “hidden” lives borne by working the sea became occasions for even more informal discussions about the consequent stress exacted on the natural and social environment. Gilubong’s backstories of charged exchanges between spouses, neighbors, in-laws and other estranged family members resiliently dealing with single-parenting and overdrawn budgets, dwindling fish harvests, infighting between fishers, corrupt local resource regulators, and family crises that need to be surmounted in isolation did not make Atienza’s final cut. Only in the more intimate interviews would respondents reveal otherwise repressed pains from being emotionally distanced from kin. Gilubong’s final form in a sense is a much more poetic film text of fragmentary renderings of routines foisted on those entangled in the global traffic of labor across the planet’s waters. By confronting viewers with three parallel vignettes of lives at sea, Gilubong’s screenings made for arguably immersive sensory encounters. The work has navigated its way through the makeshift screening spaces of homes, barangays, the Madrilejos National High School gym and church plaza, to the well appointed gallery spaces of Manila, Bacolod, and Kuryokhin, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Collaboratively supported by the NCCA, the Office for Culture and Design, and Dienst Kunst en Cultuur, Gilubong gained for Atienza residencies at La Trobe University, Liverpool Hope Creative Campus, Artesan Gallery Singapore, and Omi International Artist’s residency, New York, as part of her winning the 2012 Ateneo Art Award.