Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho
or
Thu, 4 May 2017, 7 pm
Amy Lien (*1987, USA) & Enzo Camacho (*1985, Philippines) have been collaborating since 2009, initially between New York and Manila, which has set the conditions for a practice that attempts to feed back certain fissures in globalized exchange. They maintain a restless flexibility with regards to material processes, less concerned with the interplay between established artistic mediums (sculpture, photography, painting, performance, etc.) than with the interplay between physical materials, living bodies, and information.
During their Site Visit they will present a video project on which they have been working since 2012. It takes as its starting point the 1979 experimental melodrama Palermo oder Wolfsburg, directed by the German filmmaker Werner Schroeter. That film traces the story of an impoverished young Sicilian man who, after migrating to Germany, finds employment and a new life at the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, until a thwarted romance with a young German woman leads him to murder two German men. Lien and Camacho appropriated this film as a psychologically-loaded lens through which to investigate the themes of transnational movement, labour, trade, and cultural difference into the present day, suggesting also how artist bodies are moved and circulated by these broader economic forces. The rough cut includes footage shot in Palermo, Wolfsburg, Manila, Singapore, and recently Yiwu and Shanghai, and is edited to a looped audio sequence from the original film.