Adaptation finds its strongest points when it foregrounds the politics of climate change, advocating for gentleness when the planet is pillaged by environmental violence, yet it does not renounce accountability from the colonial and capitalist suspects of climate change.

Words and Images by Chesca Santiago
June 6, 2023

Swinging open the glass doors leading into the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) Manila, one gets greeted by an unusual scene: a woman washing the lifeless body of a whale washed up on a beach. It’s a video still from Patty Chang’s Invocation for a Wandering Lake (2015-2016), a two-part performance video where Chang ceremonially scrubs a deceased whale and an abandoned ship in contemplation of mortality, history, and ecology.

Impressions like this constitute Adaptation: A Reconnected Earth, MCAD Manila’s latest group exhibition running from 28 March to 23 July 2023. The exhibition guide reads Adaptation as “an approach to determining the present within the realities of a changed climate, a despairing planet, and a recently renewed humanity.” It makes clear its intention: rather than rewind the ecological clock to its pristine, untouched state, it seeks a “‘humane’ approach to living in the present,” foremost through the modalities of care and compassion.

Thus, as one moves past Patty Chang’s video projection on cardboard panels, which strategically conceals the rest of the exhibition, Adaptation opens up into a mixed-media microcosm of our ecosystem as it is lived and experienced across the globe. Dead whales, abandoned ships, open-pit mines, man-made landscapes, landfills, and beehive buzzes are articulated into video stills, C-prints, large-scale installations, sound recordings, and dioramas.

Positioned in the center of the space are Derek Tumala’s four-piece dioramas (all from 2023) replicating ecologically transformed, at times ravaged, landscapes in the Philippines. Two are modeled from indigenous practices and populations—from kaingin practices in Palawan and from upland rice terracing in Ifugao. But most prominent is the large-scale Unearthing of a Funny Weather, an 800 x 500 x 240 cm papier-mâchê model of an open-pit mine. When viewed from the mezzanine floor, the diorama reveals the expansive, barren aftermath of extractive practices, which Tumala circles back to capitalism and colonialism.

Similarly, Bartolina Xixa’s Dry Twig, The Permanent Coloniality (2019) recasts the same themes in a performance video of the artist dancing in a smokey landfill. The video begins with Bartolina Xixa dancing merrily, almost hopeful and emancipated, until it descends into a suffocating routine as smoke from the landfill intensifies. From the video’s manifesto written by the creators themselves, Dry Twig is a more explicit attack against the colonial-capitalist underpinnings of climate change. With rage and courage, they call out the structural inequalities that force vulnerable populations, including those in Jujuy, Argentina from which the artist hails, to suffer more from the material realities of the climate crisis. And as the finale of the performance concludes, it is a suffering that offers no escape.

Extending Patty Chang’s multi-species intervention is Issay Rodriguez’s Song of Increase (2023). The acoustic installation features sound produced by bees, transmitted through bamboo- and coconut-made contraptions hanging from MCAD’s ceiling. The installation is a sonic-spatial encounter, as visitors hear the sounds in varying oscillations while they move around the venue. Drawn from Rodriguez’s research in a bee farm in Indang, the sounds are produced by bees according to weather, seasons, and beekeeping activities, broadly shedding light on the far-reaching link between bees and the environment.

While a large part of the exhibition draws from photographs, videos, models, and recordings adapted from real conditions, Lui Medina’s digital C-prints leave room for reimagined vistas. Her works for Adaptation are reconstructed terrains lifted from the Philippines and from other regions. What emerges is a landscape that is both familiar and foreign—an imagined lushness that contradicts the barrenness of Tumala’s dioramas adjacent to Medina’s prints.

As the exhibition guide states, care and compassion inform the central proposition of the Adaption. We see this in various forms through works such as those of Rodriguez and Chang, who foreground interspecies care amid a deteriorating planet. However, to stop here will leave the exhibition in danger of being reactive and utopic, blind to the political history of the climate crisis.

Thus, Adaptation finds its strongest points when it foregrounds the politics of climate change. It advocates for gentleness when the planet is pillaged by environmental violence, yet it does not renounce accountability from the colonial and capitalist suspects of climate change. It calls upon reconnection with the present state of the planet, yet it does not disregard the history of this ecological injustice. As Bartolina Xixa in Dry Twigs meditates, emancipation is impossible lest the structural underpinnings of the crisis be unraveled. Altogether, Adaptation presents a comprehensive take on the climate crisis—one that spans spaces and species, calls for care and rage simultaneously.