Christian Tenefrancia Illi



About

Selected Works:

THE DROP (2025)

REVERSED DUNK (2023)

SOIL-BEINGS: Lamánlupa (2024/25)

Flat Works or Untitled Material Studies: 갯벌 (2025)

Field Notes on (Structural) Silence:
Or, How to Camouflage with Colours (2025)

TINIKLING.EXE / TERROR or 3/4 (2022)

Renegotiations in Self-Determination: Being In-Between (2020)

Choreographies of Labo(u)r (2020)

Something of Substance / In the End (2020)

《 Mashed Potato 》 (2020)

LUDWIG VAN — BTHVN: Hommage à Mauricio Kagel (2020)

FRAGMENTS OF IDENTITY in the postcolonial PHILIPPINES — DIPLOMA (2017/18)

« Ceci n'est pas l'Afrique » ; 𝔅𝔢𝔯𝔱𝔥𝔬𝔩𝔡 ℑ𝔩𝔩𝔦 (2002) -- Tropical Malady (2017/18)

花樣年華 — IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2017)

St. Luke’s — Medical Center (2017)

SELF-CRITICISM — 自己批判 (2017)

They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals / Kinakatay nila kami parang mga hayop / 他们像屠宰动物一样屠杀我们 — 自己批判 (2016)

COURAGE & INTEGRITY (2015)

L i ñ a g e s (2015)

HERDING ISLANDS, RATS & THE ANTHROPOCENE — Planting ≠ Rice (2015)

P E R D U — À la recherche du temps perdu (2015)

Noli me tángere; อันล่วงละเมิดมิได้ {TOUCH ME NOT} (2015)

南華早報 — SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST: The Nine-Dash Line (2013—ongoing)

P Á R Á S Ï T É — A Great Orgy (2013)

CHAU CHAT: Le Début — X.Y. op. 39 (2010)



Contact

   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) 

THE DROP


<The Drop> is a site-specific installation and ritual act that connects Imja-do with the historical ruins of a salt farm on Jeungdo. Within a context marked by administrative boundaries between islands and long-standing regional distance, the relocation of a single anchor became a time of institutional negotiation, trust, and physical labor—a layered process of collaboration. Recovered from the shoreline of Imja-do and transported across multiple islands, the anchor carries the traces of travel, weight, and shared labor. Discovered on 20 September 2025, moved to Jeungdo on 22 October, and finally released on 20 November from a height of twelve meters, the anchor was driven into the ground in a single, irreversible gesture accompanied by a salpuri; 살풀이 ritual. Embedded within a concrete basin and buried one meter beneath the surface, this act inscribes the memories held by both sites—extraction, loss, and displacement—into material form.
(2023) 

SOIL-BEINGS: Lamánlupa


Soil-beings (Lamánlupa) reimagines architecture through the principles of soil-body and soil-time. Architecture often reduces soil to a stabilising substance providing ecosystem services. However, by perceiving soil as alive and forceful, the project explores how it might reshape architectural aspirations and solutions.

Rooted in Philippine soils, the pavilion positions soil at the centre of understanding and creation. Through translocal workshops, the project acts as a platform for longterm research and creative education that unites technical experts, local governments, cultural workers, indigenous leaders, and communities who make soil ethically and aesthetically significant. By “unbuilding” architectural imagination, it considers artistic methodologies and fosters alternative alliances for ecological and technological kinship.


Philippine Pavilion at the 19^th La Biennale di Venezia
(Mostra internazionale di architettura di Venezia, 2025)
(2024/25) 

Flat Works or Untitled Material Studies: 갯벌


<Flat Works> are a constellations of soil pigments, salt crystals, discarded fishing nets, marine ropes, and steel components collected from the tidal flats of Shinan, South Korea. ^{* UNESCO World Heritage-listed tidal flats in the Yellow Sea}

Through these materials, the works explores how a landscape holds traces of color, time, labor, climate, and technological transformation all at once. Each composition exceeds the frame of painting, operating instead as an ecological cross-section, a surface of land sedimented with time—un-folding like layered narratives.

Set against the shifting landscape of the salt fields, this series confronts the inscription ‘LAND FOR SALE’ as both provocation and symptom. It embodies how nature is structured and consumed as part of an industrial logic. The land is no longer an (in)visible ecosystem or a living ground—it is surveyed, partitioned, and exhibited under the flow of capital, often reduced to a ‘flattened value.’

When terrain is translated into sculptural language, how does the landscape become a surface for exchange? What is lost—or reinforced—when nature’s cross-section is re-framed as canvas?

<Flat Works or Untitled Material Studies: Getbol> lingers on the post-industrial surface, translating the silence and residue embedded in the land into consumable ‘flat works.’ In this process, color and texture becomes less a visual ornament than a forensic device, and the flattened plane functions not as a memorial but as a question. It is a study in the politics of natural aesthetics, where memory, labor, and structure converge.



(2025) 

Field Notes on (Structural) Silence: Or, How to Camouflage with Colours

Structured in four chapters—each addressing colour and structure, impact and repetition, and irreversibility—the work offers a layered recording of the transformations of land, the sedimentation of labor, and the silent traces of resistance specific to the region of Sinan.

Rather than progressing through narrative or visual continuity, the four chapters of <Field Notes on (Structural) Silence: Or, How to Camouflage with Colours> unfold through sensory rhythms and spatial frequencies that prompt bodily responses in the viewer. Each video functions as both an autonomous and interlinked field, gradually altering the visitor’s modes of attention—through shifts in gaze, sound vibrations, and tonal fluctuations in light. As a result, viewers are drawn less to visual meaning and more to the tactile logic of rhythm, as the entire space begins to operate as a kind of “sensory climate.”


(2025) 

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. 

The installation resurrects the choreography of Tinikling, a folk dance that is at once a celebration and a reenactment of punishment. 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 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)

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)

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)

Something of Substance / In the End
(2020)

《 Mashed Potato 》 


「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)