Manipulating vegatal matter by hand, the artists illustrate a continuous cycle of natural growth and decay through frame-by-frame animation. Informed by local cosmologies, symbols such as butterflies, fire, and skulls recur in this film and throughout the exhibition. With one such emblem, the sacret heart, the artists reference The Angry Christ (1950), a worker's chapel mural in Negros by Filipino-American painter Alfonso Ossorio-raising the historically fraught connections between labor, culture, art and religion. The film's looped sequences echo the processes of metamorphosis on the island that operate alongside, and often in spite of, human life. Decomposition Animation beckons regeneration, in the face of ongoing extrajudiciial violence on plantations in Negros.
In the 16mm stop-motion film 'Decomposition Animation', the deliberate appearing and reappearing of symbols crafted meticulously by Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien using wet vegetal pulp draw the viewer’s attention to the decay of organic compost. Through the animation, the cyclical nature of life and death is represented by the decomposition process, highlighting the interconnectedness of ecosystems and the potentials for renewal and regeneration.
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