Christian Tenefrancia Illi

Christian Tenefrancia Illi

Imprint

REVERSED DUNK

‘Reversed Dunk’ explores the intricate complexities of urban dynamics, historical perceptions and monumental manifestations of capitalism as well as perspectives on cultural appropriation.

Reversed Dunk is a public space intervention in the form of a large scale, site specific installation. An impossible basketball court has been installed at Warschauer Brücke. The realization is a commentary on the structural limitations for genuine urban culture within the neoliberal logic of spatial aggregation and separation. Designed in accordance with the physical and symbolic character of the surrounding area, Reversed Dunk reflects on the historical transformation of the former borderline zone—between traditionally working class neighbourhoods of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain—into a district of commerce, tourism and mass entertainment. Decapitated exponential growth: Echoing a fragment of a piece of the Berlin Wall KIM/ILLI’s installation points to the history of gentrification and arrival of global capital to Berlin since 1989. The processes which result in new separations and divisions within the city and expropriation of quotidian urban street cultures. Beyond critical and discursive commentary Reversed Dunk is an attempt to restore public space and create a public vessel for testimonies of gentrification—a site for public expression and articulation of social sentiment.

(2023)

Art in Architecture / Public Intervention / Site-specific
Amazon / Allianz Tower (BIG), Warschauer Brücke, Berlin

TINIKLING.EXE / TERROR or ¾

A machine stutters. Metal arms snap together, gnashing like mechanical jaws. Bamboo poles collide, a violent clap echoing through the space. The rhythm is both erratic and relentless—too forceful to be graceful, too (un)precise to be human/machine. A foot hovers over a pedal, hesitant. To step is to activate the machine. To activate the machine is to invoke the past.

The installation resurrects the choreography of Tinikling, a folk dance that is at once a celebration and a reenactment of colonial punishment. In the Spanish-occupied Philippines, those who failed to meet their labor quotas were forced between bamboo poles that clapped against their ankles—an improvised device of discipline, later transformed into ritual. The dance is an algorithm of survival: a body forced to adapt to rhythms not of its own making, leaping between violent constraints, improvising within the logic of colonial rule.

Here, the human dancer is absent. Instead, robotic limbs—scavenged from the wreckages of the extractive automobile industry—inherit the task of mechanical violence. The bamboo, once a tool of both punishment and play, now performs autonomously, detached from its historical operators. The machine does not dance. It does not remember. It only executes.

But somewhere between execution and repetition, a question arises; who or what is the subject of this performance? The colonial apparatus has long automated itself—economic policies, surveillance technologies, global labor flows—each iteration more abstracted than the last. The tinikling bird, evading its captors, has become data. The foot hovers over the pedal. A decision lingers. In the gaps between movement and machinery, between history and code, resistance is rewritten.

(2022)

Bamboo Poles, Robotic Arms; Wiper Motors, Stomp Box
Exhibition View: Art Nou 2022, H2O Gallery, Barcelona

Renegotiations in Self-Determination: Being In-Between

The project ‘Renegotiations in Self-Determination: Being In-Between’ aims on contextualising the impact of colonialism and globalisation in portraying the ‘state-of-being’ of (undocumented) Oversea Filipino Workers in Barcelona. The attempt of creating artificiality: the paradox process of constructing intimacy (The Colour of Truth: Documentarism in the Artistic Field, Hito Steyerl), descriptions of Marx’s theory of alienation from the self as a consequence of capitalistic fetishisms of endless growth and optimised production mechanisms. Narratives of individuals accepting deprivation for the sake of economic improvement and delusive abundance. Their migration experience shapes and fragments their ‘identity’*, self-determination and self-construction, which elevates the importance of their (des)integration in society in the format of coexistence, cooperation and collaboration.

Dispersed in the city of Barcelona, ‘Renegotiations in Self-Determination: Being In-Between’ is an analysis and a series of encounters with OFWs, historiographical references, cultural agents, and institutions.

(2020)

Modular Works: Object Constellations & Configurations No. I-V
Framed Water Tank, Water Pump, Steel Substructure,
Continuous Paper Forms, Institutional Chairs, Dot Matrix Printers

Choreographies of Labo(u)r

The attempt of creating artificiality: the paradox process of constructing intimacy. Finding patterns and structures in capturing the ‘Choreographies of Labo(u)r’ in the very specificity of precise actions and body movements of (undocumented) oversea workers in their field of execution. Thus creating juxtapositions of diverse acts of mechanical and soft gesticulations that can be translated into a performative act: causing a double bind — the intimate tie between behaviour and communication — in the collective minds that transpose methodologies of violence and exploitation into the actuality and climate of daily life.

(2020)

Installation View: 5-Channel Video / Steel Frame / Swivel Chairs

(undocumented) Construction Worker Session IV: 5-Channel Video / Selected Stills / Duration: 8’ 4”

(undocumented) Filipino Hairdresser Session I: 5-Channel Video / Selected Stills / Duration: 11’ 8”

Something of Substance / In the End

(2020)

Single-Channel / Selected Stills / Loop Duration: 25’ 45”

PARATEXT #48 @HANGAR.ORG, Barcelona
Installation & Projections w/ Live Printing Performance

《 Mashed Potato 》 (2020)

「Directive Curation」 is a simulation service that helps museums and audiences to reflect and re-examine their own behavioral patterns.
《 Mashed Potato 》 questions and expands the exhibition space, artworks, and the audience through its audio guide.

Museums resemble older ritual sites not so much because of their specific architectural references but because they, too, are settings for ‘rituals’. There is a social construct of how one should behave within certain decorum. The participants remain anonymous, and follow prescribed forms of conduct. The visitors enact the ritualistic behavior that occurs in the secular setting of museums or galleries.

The exhibition 《 Mashed Potato 》 provides a mock-up setting as a test ground to experiment and reconsider physical and non-physical ritualistic behaviour in the well-mannered milieu of a gallery environment. Visitors are being conducted with the help of an “Audio Instructional Guide” that widens their perception and evokes unexpected behaviour in correspondance with the objects in space that are habitually declared as works of art in the omnipresent white cube setting.

「Directive Curation」은 미술관과 관객에게 그들 자신이 가지고 있던 관습적인 행동 양식을 다시금 점검하고 나아가 새롭게 구성할 수 있도록 돕는 시뮬레이션 서비스이다. 「Directive Curation」은 자체적인 오디오 가이드를 통해 그것이 어떠한 전시인가, 어떠한 전시였는가를 초월하는 화법으로 전시 공간, 작가, 작품, 관객에 대한 접근을 확장적으로 해석한다.
「Directive Curation」은 서비스 이름이자 팀 이름이기도 하며, 팀의 구성원으로는 김슬비, 김현서, 티슈 오피스Tissue Office(이상익, 이승아, 이창훈, 조영), Christian Tenefrancia Illi가 있다.

(2020)

년 6월 5일 금요일부터 20일 토요일까지 whatreallymatters Seoul, KOR 2020

LUDWIG VAN — BTHVN: Hommage à Mauricio Kagel

Humanist(?)

^{Beethoven war ein glühender Anhänger der Werte der französischen Revolution:}Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit.

Das Jubiläumsprogramm setzt sich mit Beethovens gesellschaftskritischen Positionen auseinander — ebenso wie mit seiner universellen Bedeutung und den verschiedenen politischen Vereinnahmungen. Das Thema Völkerverständigung, das Beethoven wichtig war, wird auch das Jubiläumsprogramm prägen.

Migrant Hybridism versus Subalternity: Can the Subaltern Speak German?
The German-speaking discourse distanced itself from postcolonial theory for a long time with the argument that neither Germany nor Austria nor Switzerland were major colonial powers. Only recently, postcolonial theory has received academic attention in the German speaking context through focus on issues like migration, racism, interculturality, and globalisation. Consequently, there is an emerging discussion regarding the consequences of colonialism and postcolonial critique for the German-speaking context. This has given rise to a range of questions like: “Is postcolonial theory relevant and applicable to the German context?”, “Who is the subaltern in Germany and are there subalterns, who speak German?”

It has been proposed that migrants in the postcolonial German-speaking context can be understood to be subalterns, who cannot be heard by the hegemonic dominant culture. Migrants are thereby ‘subalternized’ and strategies are explored for bringing to ar- ticulation of ‘silenced’ minority voices. Here, the intellectual migrants from ‘subaltern groups’ become the spokesperson for the ‘margins’.

Hybridity as “migrant race-mobility”
In the face of international capitalism, Spivak cautions us against the privileging of metropolitan spaces, whereby in our enthusiasm for migrant hybridity and First World marginality, the gendered subaltern is once again silent for us. She warns that with global re-territorializing in the New World Order, migrant reality and globality are taking all the attention of the radical cultural worker in the metropolis. According to her, the trajectories of the Eurocentric migrant poor and the postcolonial rural poor are not only discontinuous but may be, through the chain-linkage that we are encouraged to ignore, opposed. According to her, migrant hybrid identity is an upper class migrant concept and provocatively calls ‘hybridity-talk’ as “migrant race-mobility” (Spivak 1993: 250), whereby she explains that the questions of race and postcoloniality are not necessarily identical. Thus, she emphatically distances herself from migrant hybridism. In an interview she remarks:

Hybrid identity is upper class migrant concept. You know to assume that you have ‘irreducible cultural translation’ in your identity. I have written about it elsewhere. Translation is not that easy. It is quite precise if you look where hybridity is described. In an interview of Homi K. Bhabha it is said that there is always an irreducible translated other culture in the consciousness of the ID and that is not just philosophically and theoretically but also practically and politically not at all an interesting concept and Homi and I are allies and very good friends and therefore based on that friendship we can also be critical and in this respect I am deeply critical of the political implication of it. If you look at it you would see it is quite precise. And in its precision it is, I think, indulgent towards a class subject. Subalternity has nothing to do with cultural translation of any kind. In its much more practical idea of not having access. (Spivak 2002)

Bibliography:

Steyerl, Hito (2002): “Can the Subaltern speak German? Postcolonial critique in German context”.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1990): The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, Sarah Harasym (ed.), New York/London: Routledge

(2020)

Single-Channel, Duration: 3″ 01′ Min.

(2017/18)

“We already know you were conquered by the Spanish, sold to the Americans, raped by the Japanese and totally fucked over by the Marcoses …”
— Adeline Ooi’s assessment on Philippine contemporary art

花樣年華 — IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

Source — Sauce:
Can the Subtitles speak?

It is always more interesting to be seemingly a victim or there is another variation of this: seemingly completely sympathetic to you as a victim. That is also a claim of common subalternity. I re-quote Theodore Roosevelt […]: “Speak softly but carry a big stick”. So the big stick carriers would like not to acknowledge that they are carrying big sticks. Here comes forth the ‘speak softly’ part because, paradoxically, no subaltern claims subalternity. The subaltern thinks either that this is normal to have no access to lines of mobility (I see enough of them feeling that), it is really frightening, or they want to get the hell out of subalternity. Whenever you hear someone claiming subalternity you know that this is all that it is, that they are speaking softly because somewhere they are carrying a big stick […]. That is the challenge to what the so called international civil society does, which is take advantage of the big stick, some of them are even calling themselves subaltern which is incredibly meretricious and really criminally wrong […]. But I would be very distant from such sympathy; I would rather see that behind their ‘speaking softly’ is a big stick. I don’t find it very interesting when academic from somewhere tells me that he or she is from marginalised cultural background (Spivak 2003)

Bibliography:

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1994): “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In: Patrick Williams/Laura Chrisman (ed.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf: 66-111

(2017)

(茨岡女神) . . Yezi H . .
(Cígāng nǚshén) . . Yezi H . .

St. Luke’s — Medical Center

(2017)

路加: St. Luke’s — Medical Center (Print)
Still Series, 23 p.