“I am the colour of burnt pineapple, mango, lemon”: An Interview with Stephanie Comilang
Yesterday, In The Years 1886 and 2017 (2017) is a two-channel video installation by Stephanie Comilang that collapses documentary and science fiction to tell a story about Philippine migration to Germany. The work is narrated in Tagalog by the film’s unseen protagonist, Paradise, who speaks from our future. Her past is one of reincarnations. She has lived as the lauded Filipino nationalist José Rizal, who migrated to Germany temporarily in the 1880s—a statue of whom was erected in the small town of Wilhelmsfeld in 1978—and the Berlin-based archivist and Filipina migrant Lourdes Lareza Müller, who relocated to Germany in 1968, both of whose lives are fictionalized here. José and Lourdes were two of very few Filipinos living in the country in their respective times.
Paradise lives in a space and time free from the oppression of colonization, heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. Comilang engages both historical and personal narratives, filtering them through a semi-fictive sieve as an imaginative decolonization strategy that at once forges an alternative archive of Philippine migration to Germany and points to a utopic future.
Heather Rigg: Your work often merges fiction and reality, in a hybridization that you’ve referred to as “science fiction documentary.” In Yesterday, Lourdes’ and Jose’s lives are reimagined, but unlike historical fiction where people’s lives are dramatically retold, here, fiction and documentary seem to overlap and entwine together without becoming each other. Can you speak about this aspect of the work and of your practice?
Stephanie Comilang: I, the pineapple is an object that comes up in both Lourdes’ and José’s storylines that didn’t exist before. Lourdes talks about the fruit as a cherished food item from home that was exorbitantly expensive to buy in Berlin in the 1970s, while José tells the story of a bomb disguised as an ornate, jewel-encrusted pineapple that was offered to colonizers. In Lourdes’ original story, the pineapple was a chayote and in José’s, it was a pomegranate. The narrator in , Paradise, also weaves a pineapple—a burnt one—into her own story, to describe the colour of her skin. The pineapple is a fruit which has travelled alongside histories of colonization; it follows a line from South America, to Europe and finally, Asia. The fruit has a migration history, one that echoes the movement and trajectory of the characters in this work.
