Stephanie Comilang

I’m based in Berlin. I was born in Toronto and spent most of my life there before moving here in 2012, so I’ve lived here a while now.

I think from an early age I always knew I wanted to be an artist but I didn’t really know what that would look like. I think when you’re a kid you don’t know what that looks like, but the idea of something creative was something that I was thinking about. I ended up going to art school in Toronto for my BFA. Through that, I became involved in the art scene in Toronto, and I actually started making music videos before documentaries, which then eventually led to more documentary and experimental style films.

I actually moved with an ex-boyfriend who got a residency in Berlin! (laughs) I imagined something bigger for myself and knew that I wanted to move outside of what I knew, which was just Canada. So we moved to Berlin together and then I decided to stay. It took me a while to get comfortable and find my place in Berlin, but now I really love it. My gallery is here and I have a really great community of friends. It’s a great place to be an artist (maybe not right now), but there’s so many different people here. The art scene is so large, there are so many pockets and it’s always changing.

Yeh exactly, there’s always new people and spaces that open up all the time. There’s constant movement in the city and that makes it really interesting.

No, I never was into painting. When I applied to art school for my undergrad, I was so young I didn’t really know, so weirdly I applied for jewellery making. I still really love jewellery, but back then I had just come back from a trip to the Philippines to visit family. I made a portfolio based on that trip and a lot of it was more installation based, so I got into school because of that. I ended up on an integrated media course, which actually made sense for me because I’ve loved film since childhood. I wasn’t a film nerd, but I watched all the auteurs like Won Kar-wai and Godard - the kind of films you watch when you’re young and giving yourself an education. I was also really into experimental film. There’s this Filipino filmmaker called Kidlat Tahimik, and he’s the godfather of experimental cinema in the Philippines. That was the first time I’d seen someone I could relate to, whose work was similar to what I wanted to do.
I did a residency for a year in Florence with my school, and I was using an overhead projector because I didn’t have a film camera. I used that to create films, then I toured with a musician and started making music videos. So I was always interested in using technology and twisting it to the way I wanted to use it. I still do that now, I’ve used analogue technology, drones, iPhones, VR. It’s always a tool for me.

I’m drawn to it because my parents are immigrants and they came to Canada from the Philippines. I’m always thinking about how immigrants create homes in places that aren’t theirs and of the division between inside and outside the home. Inside the home language, food and customs are different, so when you leave home everything changes. I always gravitate towards themes of migration as an artist. It’s just what I know, the experience is familiar. It’s always personal, right, the things we draw from?

The exhibition is about monarch butterflies who are the longest travelling insects in the world. It’s also about Filipino seafarers. 25% of the world’s seafarers are from the Philippines. I’m also thinking about the colonial trade routes between the Philippines and Mexico connecting Manilla to Acapulco for 300 years.

During the pandemic there were lots of stories in the news about people who couldn’t come home, people stuck on ships or sometimes even stuck in their home ports. A lot of them were from the Philippines. I was thinking about how that would feel if you could see your home but couldn’t return to it. That’s how it came about. I was asked to make a short video for ocean archive an online platform for TBA21 related to that. Search for Life turned into an expansion of that video, called Diaspora Ad Astra.

I think about objects that connect places. In the past it’s been a pineapple for instance.

Yes, so in the Philippines it’s called piña, which is Spanish for pineapple. The name itself has a transglobal element to it. The pineapple is from South America and was brought to the Philippines by the Spaniards. There’s so many things that travelled during that colonial period, you only need to focus on one object and there’s always a much larger story behind it. I focused on the pineapple in another project called Piña Why is the Sky Blue? about precolonial shamanism in the Philippines and Ecuador.
I don’t always take from nature, but I think in relation to migration and colonisation there’s so many things you just need to look at once and you see it: sugarcanes, potatoes, chillies, chocolate, vanilla, palm, coconut. All of these things which come from nature and have such a deep history, there’s so much to talk about in them.

I made a film in 2016/17 called Come to me Paradise about Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong told from the perspective of a ghost, played by a drone. For that film I knew I didn’t want to make a straightforward documentary because I have issues with proposing a supposed truth. For a documentary or film to propose the truth feels like a strange thing. I don’t want to do that and I just don’t think I’d be good at it. I always create a fictional narrative or alternative voices to propose something other and challenge the documentary truth. For me it feels easier to speak from a voice that doesn’t exist in the real world. It somehow gives a rounder picture. I also find writing from a fictional perspective easier to write from because I’m thinking of multiple different characters rather than one individual.

I know my past work appeals to such a broad range of people because a lot of my work deals with the amorphous ideas of home and we all have different ideas of what home means. It’s not this obscure storytelling or cryptic form of art, so I know it will appeal to many. I’m not actively trying to do that, but I know that the themes I deal with speak to a lot of people.

Yes of course, the environment always affects us when we’re growing up. Toronto is a pretty multicultural city and there’s a big Filipino community. Canada has an interesting and strange geopolitical placement because it is beside America, though it distinguishes itself from it, and is also part of the commonwealth so it’s partly British. On top of that a lot of the discourse and problematics centre around indigenous people and their land, which are super important issues. So these are things that are and have been in my orbit growing up. Since my parents are from the Philippines, this other place was always something I had in my background periphery as another home, another part of me. Whenever I go there I simultaneously feel like I belong but don’t. It’s kind of like that in Canada too, very familiar but also never entirely my home.

I think it just means that home came be many different things and it can always change. It’s complex and it’s something I can always tap into with my practice. It’s always a central theme for me.

Well, you know the title comes from a song that’s in the film. It plays at the end as one of the seafarers sings it in karaoke. It’s by an American band called Dirty Projectors, you should listen to it! It’s really beautiful and reminded me of the way I imagine a butterfly would write, it feels like it’s from a butterfly’s perspective so I knew I wanted to put it into the film. Also Search for Life can be heard as a kind of command. There’s an urgency to those words reminiscent of astronauts or space travel. There’s lots of interesting connotations to it, but I also just love the song and knew that I wanted that as an element in the film before I made it.

Well, I used to get my nails done all the time and I haven’t done that in a while. I have an archive of nail inspiration online that I’m obsessed with looking at. I’d love to do a project about nails. Now I’m just focused on part 2 of this project in Sharjah for the Sharjah Biennial 16 in 2025. I’m going to go to Sharjah in April. It’s also a historic port town, so I’m looking forward to seeing the things that pass through the port and talking to people there. It’s made up of all migrants, the UAE, so that’ll be really interesting.

(laughs) At least for two projects!