Christian Tenefrancia Illi



About

Selected Works:

REVERSED DUNK (2023)

SOIL-BEINGS: Lamánlupa (2024/25)

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)

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)



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Imprint

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)