Earth Body Bukid
Siddharta Perez, in response to the artist Catalina Africa

Earth Body Bukid bridges an intermediary field between the artist’s distinct rural environment and her intimacies with the landscape in Baler. This coastal region in the eastern part of Luzon is along the seam of the Sierra Madre mountain range and unites with the Pacific Ocean. Inland, estuaries and deltas snake and settle through the plains and forests of its towns. 

Painter Catalina Africa moved to Baler from Manila in 2015, marking a shift in her profound observation of the environment as she remolds the pictorial dimension of her polychromatic inner world. Catalina is a bricoleur, with her early engagements dealing with excesses of popular culture: its neons and sticky paraphernalia, moving images of play and pastiche of Manila’s everyday cultural mashup. The architectonic quality in Catalina’s works always renders her images into installation – the pictorial breaking out of the one-dimension and emerging into multiple planes. It is in this regard of space that Catalina expresses a distinct perspective of landscape as an animated site where ground and water bodies shift visibly and invisibly vibrate evermore. 

In Earth Body Bukid, Catalina sets out on a somatic expression of rooting to a forest, visualizing the interdependence of tending to the natural world as embodied beings. The bukid, translated as a managed plot of land – farm, is also seen as “the other place” from one’s domicile in the rural way of living. One leaves the house and travels to the bukid, even if it’s one’s backyard. For Catalina, the bukid she currently tends to is a five-minute trek from her home. Because a creek begins in their property, trails often submerge and re-emerge when it rains. The pathways are uneven as the spring expands its body around the area. The bukid is liminal – pulsing with coastal storms, following the principles of the larger forest ecosystem. The painting “Earth Body Bukid” is Catalina’s cartographic palimpsest, where she traces the bukid’s totality as the larger landscape while manifesting its atomic animation. The vocabulary of animacy is that the natural world is always alive, that a bukid is related to by its terms of being rather than getting cultivated by human command. Mapping a non-static site, Catalina has to visualize an energetic passage of Baler: the ridges of trees zinging like water through all crevices and chasm, the ascending ripples of the lake, plants exhaling, and the spiral of propagation whirling itself as the source of the creek. In this sense, the artist expresses the boundlessness of the bukid by the nature its vitality. 

Catalina has been mending the soil in her bukid, and upon clearing the overgrowth, she observes the appearance of the makahiya (Mimosa pudica) and kurombot (Passiflora foetida). “plant/spirit/portal” names Catalina’s first lessons from the landscape, where respiration is the essence of moving life through. The breath of plants gathers air, light, and water to make food – as is the human’s way of cultivating food. The elements of this process frame the painting; the motifs and dynamics of photosynthesis are set as a backdrop. The being dancing in the foreground is numinous: spirit playing out the portal of plant to magic. 

The portraits of plants by Catalina have a clear visual motif: they are multi-pronged and tinged with their unique aura. Like “plant/spirit/portal,” the being in “Plant Spirit: Makahiya 2” is tentacular, the vestige of being mimosa pudica only hinted at by the pinnate formation emanating out of its tendrils. This perennial creeping plant folds upon contact until it learns that a particular touch is no threat to its subshrub. Mirroring the energetic quality of the mimosa, this painting also harkens to the embodied landscape in a plant: roots spreading like a map, roots that branch, roots that break. The magic of the landscape, as Catalina imagines for us, is in the fractal that makes up the larger natural world. As she learns about permaculture, attuning to what is already growing is key to relating to land. Micro components – leaf, plant, soil - iterate across different scales, pointing to patterns of regeneration, rest, and respiration. 

In Catalina’s study of photosynthesis as the essence of the bukid, she writes from one moment of learning with the makahiya:

I have been thinking about makahiya a lot, she seems to enjoy this pondering from afar.
She asks, how can you hold things without touching them?
(in my vision,
In my heart,
In my awareness,
In my memory).
How do you hold and love things from afar?
Makahiya speaks to me of a receptivity to spatial dimensions,
An awareness of space.

To touch is also to be touched.
And the sensitivity of her leaves shows me that my heart too, must function this way.
I must be moved by sunlight and raindrops and the movement of the world around me.
Makahiya shows me that sensitivity is a gift.
Sensitivity to the depth of meaning found in the world around us.
Sensitivity is also playfulness is also perceptiveness.
(she is also thorny! Does she even want to be touched?)
Makahiya thus shows me complexity!
Makahiya reveals me to myself.
(mirrors are everywhere in nature)
And the fact that she is a voracious grower practically everywhere,
Tells me that makahiya wants to be SEEN 
Maybe she is a protector too, of sorts
with her thorns and sensitivities and perceptiveness
A guardian of boundaries……

(December 2024, Catalina Africa)

Multi-disciplinary artist Catalina Africa (b. 1988, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Baler, Philippines) considers shapeshifting to be her primary mode of expression. Working across mediums including painting, sound, sculpture, video, text, and performance, her artworks are invocations to the natural landscape. Resembling spells, songs, love letters, prayers, and maps, her spatial visualization of an environment pays testimony to the Earth’s mysteries and magic. Raised in Manila, the artist now lives and works in Baler, Philippines, along with her husband and child, where she cultivates a devotional practice to Spirit, transmuting Earth song and collaborating with the living land.

Africa has mounted numerous solo exhibitions, with recent shows including Shrine in the Shape of Shadow, Silverlens Manila (2022); Spiralling in Starlight Vision, ArtInformal, Manila (2022); The Quality of Sunlight is a Filter Through Which Our Thoughts and Feelings Pass, Silverlens, Manila (2019). Africa’s select group exhibitions include 12x9x35, West Gallery, Manila (2024); Shrines, Silverlens, New York (2023); Phantasmapolis x Manila: Select works from the 2021 Asian Art Biennial, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Manila (2022); Phantasmapolis, Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2021); Out of Every Pore a Universe Breaks, Vargas Museum, Manila (2021); 3rd Kamias Triennial, Kamias Special Projects, Cubao (2020); and Wild Legend, Juming Museum, New Taipei City (2015). She has participated in international residencies, including TRADES AiR, Honolulu, Hawaii (2019) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, Maine (2014), among others.