Piña, Why is the Sky Blue?
<p><em>Piña, Why is the Sky Blue?</em> is an affirming techno-feminist vision of a future in which ancestral knowledge and new technologies converge. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a video/virtual-reality installation (2021) of the same title, a speculative documentary that narrates the story of a spiritual medium known as Piña. As a form of artificial intelligence, Piña is able to receive and collect inherited knowledge, messages, and dreams from people around the world in order to secure their survival. The show featuring this newly acquired installation marks the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany of Berlin-based artists Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser.</p> <p><em>Piña, Why is the Sky Blue?</em> features footage shot in the Philippines and Ecuador, where Comilang and Speiser, respectively, have family histories. Its video component includes interviews with activists and healers from local organizations such as the Indigenous feminist collective Cyber Amazonas in Puyo, and Las Martinas de Piedras Negras in Quito, both in Ecuador; as well as with a shaman or Babaylan, in Palawan, Philippines. These are interspersed with footage of agricultural landscapes, abandoned buildings amid lush forests, and documentation of ritual activities carried out by the interviewees. Through an emphasis on matriarchal lineages and their modes of knowledge transmission, the artists consider how precolonial ways of being have survived into the present in spite of their ongoing violent oppression…</p>
Editors: Lisa Long
Artists: Stephanie Comilang, Simon Speiser
Contributors: Julia Stoschek, Lisa Long, Stephanie Comilang, Simon Speiser, Alex Quicho
Copy Editor: Alexander Scrimgeour, Luise Pilz
Translators: Volker Ellerbeck, Art language
Graphic Designer: Bureau Borsche
ISBN: 9783982453118