This April, Olga Lisabet ’26 and Corrigan Rayhill ’24 interviewed artist duo Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien, two of our Spring 2024 Fellows at the Lunder Institute for American Art.
Corrigan Rayhill: You’re working on a community papermaking workshop (at Colby) that foregrounds ideas of food sovereignty, land justice, and local ecologies. Could you talk more about what that’s going to look like?
Enzo Camacho: [pause] Sorry, we always have to take a moment to see who wants to speak first. I was going to jump in on that answer.
Ami Lien: Yeah, actually, do you want to start, Enzo?
Enzo Camacho: Sure, sure. These papermaking workshops are something we’ve been conducting over the past several years now, and they’ve been rooted in and connected to this longer-term research and work that we’ve been doing on this plantation island [Negros] in the Philippines. The starting point for them was actually a workshop that we attended on this island, I think this was back in 2018, or early 2019.
Ami Lien: I think it was 2018.
Enzo Camacho: 2018. And it was a workshop that we took ourselves at an artist-run community space in this small town on this island. It was a workshop that was geared to the local fishing community. I think the majority of the people who participated in it were women whose partners, their husbands, were mostly fisher folk. The workshop was geared towards skill sharing, potentially leading to a kind of cottage industry of handmade paper production. So we were invited to attend this workshop, and I think for us, it was really inspiring to realize the simplicity of the process. The equipment is so simple. It’s just a screen, something to drain water, sponges. It seemed like such an accessible form of creative work.
I think the realization that you could use almost any kind of plant material to produce paper was really exciting for us, especially as we were starting to research the politics of land. So we took that workshop, and then ourselves started producing handmade paperwork as part of our own artistic practice. But as we began making these works, we had the thought to try to carry forward this ethos that had initially brought us into papermaking as a process.
Anyway, that’s a long way of saying we started to develop our own papermaking workshop, and it’s something we’ve conducted amongst various communities at this point. We’ve done workshops for children from a couple of different communities in Negros. We recently did a workshop in Hong Kong amongst Filipino migrant workers. For us, it’s a really nice format for knowledge sharing and collective activity. The whole process includes foraging material, processing that material into pulp, and then producing images using this pulp. At each step, different things get activated. It’s like, okay, where can you get plant materials? Go to the market and collect vegetable scraps from the vendors. And then you can have all of these encounters and conversations as you’re collecting.
Ami Lien: We still have not decided the details of the Colby workshop. We know that it will involve a group of scholars and artists, and we’ve never done a workshop oriented towards this kind of temporary community of professional creatives and intellectuals.
Papermaking has really become a kind of tool for us for research, particularly on Negros Island. It’s been a way for our practice to grow roots there. A plantation island, it’s almost completely dominated by the sugar economy. When you’re there, you see the stark reality of an oppressive system of landowning rule which has besieged the island for more than a hundred years.
I experienced a kind of cognitive dissonance when I first observed life on the island of Negros, because it was almost inconceivable to me to how this kind of deeply feudal social reality has a place within contemporary global system. We all consume sugar, which tracks itself to terrible forms of oppression. Our work has begun to move beyond research and towards ongoing social mobilization against the plantation system on that island and broadly in the Philippines. We’re still figuring a lot of stuff out around our art practice and how it engages an audience, how it connects people to these kinds of social realities, and how it can support the people in struggle.
We make paper out of sugarcane fiber. There’s this stuff called bagasse that comes out of the mill, after the mill processes all the sugar canes. It’s this fibery byproduct, kind of a waste product. This and the local flora have gone into our works, which speaks to a biodiversity that is resistant to this monocrop plantation society. In our practice, we like using these different types of fibers, from these different plants. I guess it’s to narrate a story of plantation reality and potential change.
There’s something very accessible around making paper. As a viewer, there’s something humble, like you can recognize a corn husk or a spinach leaf or something in a drawing that you’re looking at. I think it’s part of the social ethos of our works to share this kind of art or creative technology in these different contexts.
Olga Lisabet: For your practice outside of the workshops, to what degree do you have the audience in mind? I know you work across a lot of different media and you make a lot of references to colonial legacy.
Enzo Camacho: It’s a great question. It’s something we have really put a lot of thought into: what kind of public is assumed in more, let’s say, institutional settings, and what the public of art could potentially be outside of these institutional settings. With our practice, I would say we try to move between these different kinds of spaces. And even when we’re working within more institutional spaces, we try to find ways to welcome or invite or attract other kinds of publics into these spaces.
The current exhibition we’re working on centers around this film that we recently made. It’s an experimental documentary centering the testimonials of survivors of a political massacre that happened on this island [Negros] in the mid-1980s. At the moment, we’re working on a series of exhibitions at different art institutions that will center around this film. At the same time, we’ve had screenings of this film in very localized communities on the island, first with the people who participated in the filming. We also had one screening on the island at a protest encampment of agricultural workers and peasants. Beyond this, we have had screenings in a couple of other cities in the Philippines for members of different activist organizations.
We produce our work as part of a broader social movement or with a broader social and political agenda in mind. So necessarily, in a way, it has to reach beyond what is considered to be a standard kind of art audience or art public.
Ami Lien: That’s a great answer. This question is really good because it’s something we are often interrogating ourselves. We’re still evolving our practice in terms of its accessibility or circulation. That’s one of the reasons we have moved into making a film that can both be in a museum or a gallery space, but can also get uploaded and shared in other contexts.
I feel like we haven’t quite departed from the idea of an art practice that is made for an institutional art environment. That’s somehow very deep in our collaborative DNA. But we’re thinking how the art museum is also a kind of platform and resource that can be harnessed and utilized, you know, by a movement. The institution can at least help to distribute something, to fund the circulation of a story, and possibly function in ways that’s not just extractive, just taking this thing from far away and bringing it into the cultural metropole.
Corrigan Rayhill: That leads me to another question that I had surrounding how you work with multimedia. Why is it important to you to include lectures and discussions and workshops and different forms of audience engagement, and combine that with all the different types of research that you do? I guess what I’m asking is, Why is it important to you to include such a wide variety of interdisciplinary media into your work?
Ami Lien: It’s because we’re overachievers. Just kidding [laughter]. We’ve always wanted engagement, to have a real conversation about what’s happening And, how do we put these things that we’re learning out there? Speaking has an important mode of our work, to be clear where we stand.
Enzo Camacho: Mm-hmm. Just to add to what Ami is saying. I mean, in terms of the different mediums…it is funny to hear it expressed back to us. Sometimes we’re just doing things and not fully realizing just how many different things are involved.
Maybe we feel very strongly that there are so many ways that one can approach or enter a question or a problem, and that there is a certain kind of experimentation that is necessary. A lot of the things that have become central parts of our practice really started out with us thinking, like, let’s just try this thing out and see if it somehow feels like it’s moving something forward, or really getting at a certain problem, or offering something that feels productive.
It probably also comes from the collaborative space that we de facto inhabit as collaborating artists. You know, we’ve been collaborating for over 12 years now.
Of course, we’re two different people. We really come with different life experiences and skills and backgrounds, and are trying to make use of all of those things. That leads to a certain diversity of approaches that hopefully cohere in some way, and hopefully feel like there’s some kind of unified agenda amidst all of that.
Olga Lisabet: Because you have been working together for so long, has that led to a routine? Is there a process for your work?
Corrigan Rayhill: Yeah, what does your collaborative process look like?
Ami Lien: Oh, that’s hard to describe as a situated thing because I don’t think we have a routine yet.
Enzo Camacho: After twelve years, still no routine.
Ami Lien: I have to think about this a little bit. Well, for one, we typically don’t live in the same place now. I’m based in the US and in New York and Enzo is based in Berlin. We spend large chunks of time in the Philippines. And sometimes we go to other places, according to our exhibition schedule.
Sometimes we’re sort of figuring things out on our own time and then checking in. Actually, over the years, we’ve developed some habit of…I almost would call it sharing everything, at least in terms of intellectual or creative ideas coming up, or even relevant information. We’re always quite eager to talk to each other. This kind of playful, experimental, brainstorming kind of mode, it’s probably something that has really evolved, and we are barely aware of it.
I can say, personally, I feel so, so grateful to be able to have this kind of companion in thinking through really difficult stuff. It’s not just certain research inputs from the Philippines or elsewhere that we’ve been, it’s how to build a cultural practice in relation to all of these different contexts, which sits between these different global cultural systems.
There are so many dimensions of experience that enter into the production of an artwork. I feel like there’s something that becomes both grounded and playful when we work through it together.
Enzo Camacho: That was a really great description. I don’t know if I have anything else to add, except I feel equally grateful. But I think also in terms of the practicality of this kind of practice, as Ami said, the kind of distance, like being apart, coming together, going on. In a way, that is sort of how our practice started. We started collaborating more or less around the time when I was living in Manila and Ami was living in New York. So there was already this aspect to it from the beginning.
But I think there is also a feeling that we’re sort of collaboratively constructing or always in the process of elaborating a certain framework between us, and that comes through all of these conversations, and through the pleasure in sharing that we have, as Ami mentioned.
As I said, we have different skill sets, we have different backgrounds, we’re learning skill sets from each other, and so on. There’s a certain kind of trust, I guess, that has built up over the years. Like, if one or the other of us produces something as part of this shared framework, it always feels collaborative somehow. In the process, of course, there’s always conversation.
Corrigan Rayhill: I wanted to ask how your different place-based identities, like being from the Philippines and being from the US, have come together to inform your work, and how that’s evolved. That might be a loaded question for three minutes, but…
Ami Lien: I would just gesture towards the origins of our collaboration. Because we met in university when we were around your age, and it was in the US, but our first exhibition ever was in Manila, in the Philippines. It was right after I graduated university and it was somehow a very eye-opening experience for me, particularly as an American, because of the deep colonial and imperial history of the Philippines. It’s kind of ongoing, with the United States in particular. There was something that really unsettled me.
I’m a second-generation Taiwanese-American immigrant. I already had such a fraught relationship with America in a way. I didn’t fully identify as an American. I think at that time I didn’t want to, but I think going to the Philippines and just seeing this reality, the other side of the imperial reality, relocated what it means to be an American for me—what responsibilities or desires I would have towards unpacking that more fully.
Enzo Camacho: Maybe our work has really been trying to think through the Philippines in order to understand more global relations, most especially imperial relations that of course implicate the United States and other imperial powers. But we also think about these kinds of regional conversations that happen within Asia and Southeast Asia. So our focus on the Philippine context, you know, it kind of tries to look through the Philippines, or with the Philippines, to understand a more global state of affairs. And I do think our backgrounds, our varying place-based backgrounds, kind of feed into that as well, or somehow enrich that process.
Ami Lien: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Between the Philippines, Taiwan, and the United States, there’s a very interesting triangulation. Yeah, we’ll leave it at that.
Enzo Camacho: Was that three minutes? [laughter]
This interview was created for Colby College course AR356, Writing Art Criticism, conducted over Zoom on April 12, 2024. Questions prepared and interview conducted by Olga Lisabet ’26 and Corrigan Rayhill ’24.