A rhizomatic mind in Philippine art
By Sean Carballo

This is a winning entry from the fourth Art & Market ‘Fresh Take’ writing contest. For the full list of winners and prizes, click here.

Lena Cobangbang. Photo by MM Yu. Image courtesy of the artist.

“Thought lags behind nature,” wrote philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari in their joint work A Thousand Plateaus (1987). The natural world, they contended, is multifarious and fast-morphing where thought is, as preconditioned by late modernity, hierarchical and binary. When we think of roots for instance, we picture something sprouting upwards, a point from which all else grows. But Deleuze and Guattari argued this image to be an oversimplification: “in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one.”¹ A larger picture betrays the rhizome– that fleshy and subterrestrial network we associate with ginger and bamboo stems. As an ontological metaphor, the rhizome is buried flux, containing varying dimensions moving through just as many directions.

It is not difficult to picture the rhizome’s expansive qualities impelling the mind of Lena Cobangbang, an artist whose projects flit from installation and photography to performance, embroidery, and cooking. Lena’s interests are freewheeling and crooked desires. The energy informing her art feels not so much preempted but coaxed forth from the many tabs simultaneously open in her mind.

Lena Cobangbang, ‘Terratorial Piecings 005.1 and 005.2: Deterratorialized HRO’ (detail), 2018, watercolour on paperboard puzzle set, variable dimensions. Image courtesy of MO_Space.

In our interview, Lena is spirited, her earnest laughter spilling over as she talks about her creative process. “Kalat ba?,” (“Is it messy?”) she asks with a chuckle after I attempt to enumerate the sweep of themes present in her art, contributions which span nearly three decades. I consider my answer for a second before telling her yes – yes, but surely in the best possible way.

Correction: perhaps not themes but sustained conversations. In Lena’s projects, ideas become stepping stones for conversations which take on different forms and iterations. The camouflaging of a stuffed panther in green felt becomes, in eight years, the camouflaging of a brick structure. That brick structure, in another few years, becomes literal brick watercolor paintings. Lena’s is a rhizomatic mind making lateral connections–one that toggles between multiple tabs in the event that some attachment will materialise.

“Lena’s is a rhizomatic mind making lateral connections–one that toggles between multiple tabs in the event that some attachment will materialise. ”

Those attachments eventually do materialise. And when they do, very often they arrive fiercely. Hyperactivity was a critical aspect of Lena’s upbringing, as she was a voracious reader and anime fan. “I just consumed and consumed media,” she says. An unwitting encounter with David Cronenberg’s 1983 cult classic ‘Videodrome’ was formative. So were Disney encyclopedias, where she first learned about “Western art history”. Studio Ghibli productions and satire magazines too.

But consumption is one thing, and assemblage another. Alongside absorbing films, books and albums, Lena cut out newspaper clippings, jotted down favorite lines, and filled notebooks upon notebooks with these clippings and lines. Her meticulous craft—from the miniature cut-ups of artists in ‘Declassified Field Notes From The Black Hole’ to the blown-up puzzle pieces in ‘Terratorial Piecings’—seems informed by this same impulse.

Lena Cobangbang, ‘Declassified Field Notes From The Black Hole’, 2018, installation view. Image courtesy of Archivo 1984.

Often, Lena’s art takes on assemblage as an active form of play. Marc Gaba observes in the exhibition notes to ‘Terratorial Piecings’—perhaps a reference to the Nirvana song ‘Territorial Pissings’—that “land [is] dissected and spliced from its basic syntax to its connotative meaning.” In the exhibit’s series of faux fur greenery, Lena’s handling of the medium quivers at the edge of whimsy. Elsewhere, there are traces of the romantic tinkerer in the way she threads and embroiders on the fur, creating the look of a crumpled map. Or in the scattering of puzzle pieces in “Deterratorialised HRO”—a nod to Hernando R. Ocampo’s abstract geometries. These gestures she makes in her art are ways to hijack meaning, to recall it from its institutionalised bondages. Doing so tests the limitations and borders of our thinking, an exercise she finds generative and filled with mystery. “If you do something that’s not sanctioned,” she says with a good dose of hearty mischief, “how far can you go?”

Lena Cobangbang, ‘Thread to Ground,’ 2018, embroidery on faux fur jersey, 55 x 63cm. Image courtesy of MO_Space.

Lena is referring here to her experiences of lakwatsa (wandering about) as an undergraduate in the University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD). The aimless walks around campus and malls between breaks were an “exercise in smarts,” she recalls. But Lena was no sole wanderer. UPD was where she met Gerardo Tan and Roberto Chabet, who became her mentors in painting and conceptual art. Just as crucial, it was during this time that she found herself an artistic community in the loose collective Surrounded by Water. The collective, which comprised both senior and up-and-coming artists, nourished her talents without the pressure of competition or mastery. It was a wellspring of unerring support and creative exchange.

Symbiosis is an abiding motif in Lena’s projects. She tells me about her childhood habit of compiling her favorite media into Top 10 lists, an activity she shared with her sister. Lists strike me as a customary introduction to the act of curation, but Lena’s collaboration with her sister also reveals a knack for joint efforts which became a lifelong practice. She shares the alias Alice and Lucinda with Yasmin Sison-Ching, also a member of the Surrounded by Water collective. Her artistic partnership with Mike Crisostomo became what is now The Weather Bureau, a project they began when they were both production designers.

Lena Cobangbang. Photo by Isi Laureano. Image courtesy of the artist.

Some length of silence passes after she looks back on these collaborations. She recalls a time of uncertainty and questioning, and how the effort of keeping Alice and Lucinda alive “seemed so juvenile,” especially after Sison-Ching had just become a mother. She asked Sison-Ching whether they should end the project for good.

They decided to keep Alice and Lucinda open. “Identities can fluctuate,” she maintains. “There can be no borders, no death…our identities can be immortal.” This porousness of identity, Lena’s art argues, makes community possible. And it is these relationships which prompt her to think of the rhizome as a metaphor for hybrid action. “Hybridity is symptomatic of the world we live in, to the factors that inform my work, the process I take in creating, my interests that cross-pollinate each idea,” says Lena. “They form junctures and rhizomes, creating layers and multiple readings.”

At the time of our interview, her video project on Mike de Leon’s ‘Kisapmata’ was exhibited at the Bangkok Art Biennale. Titled ‘K2 Redux,’ the thirty-minute clip finds Lena mapping out an embroidered floorplan, tracing the movements of the characters in the film. Like her best work, the clip renders her method of threading the strange with painstaking solicitude. It does what she has consistently practised: making connections that casts the viewer at the precipice of unknowing. It is a zone that blurs the line between spectator and participant and where care is met with possibility.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M or the prize sponsors.

Notes
¹Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi), University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 5.