→ 2022
TINIKLING.EXE / TERROR or ¾
A machine stutters. Metal arms snap together, gnashing like mechanical jaws. Bamboo poles collide, a violent clap echoing through the space. The rhythm is both erratic and relentless—too forceful to be graceful, too (un)precise to be human/machine. A foot hovers over a pedal, hesitant. To step is to activate the machine. To activate the machine is to invoke the past.
The installation resurrects the choreography of Tinikling, a folk dance that is at once a celebration and a reenactment of colonial punishment. In the Spanish-occupied Philippines, those who failed to meet their labor quotas were forced between bamboo poles that clapped against their ankles—an improvised device of discipline, later transformed into ritual. The dance is an algorithm of survival: a body forced to adapt to rhythms not of its own making, leaping between violent constraints, improvising within the logic of colonial rule.
Barcelona, ES