The Coconut Tree Methodology is both reflection and proposition: to sense the world and grasp the changes that are shaping it right now. For Martha Atienza, that world is anchored to Bantayan Island in Cebu, where the Dutch-Filipino artist was in part raised, bearing witness to coastlines being transformed by rising sea levels: a fact that Atienza has diligently documented as a central facet of her award-winning transdisciplinary practice. Highlighting that shift is video the artist took in 2026 of a seawall built along the same stretch of coastline she filmed in 2019, when fallen coconut trees peppered an open shore, their roots shaken loose by rising sea levels and consequent coastal erosion. As Atienza notes, those coconut trees were the first to register the transformations being wrought by climate change. First they fell. Then, they were cast adrift, carrying traces of past attachments while bearing the weight of uncertain futures into the sea. Some of these spectral sentinels found their way back to land with a warning, their forms transformed into embodied testimonies of their displacement: a politics without words.

In this shifting landscape, everything becomes a witness, from the concrete encasing waterlines like tombs to the fisherfolk struggling to retain their connection to the sea. Even those who enter the gallery, far from Bantayan Island, are drawn into a reality that the coconut trees amplify in their monumental silence. Atienza honours each wordless testimony by gathering these drifting forms into an assembly where they might speak, beyond language, in terms that all living things must share.

Words by Stephanie Bailey

Martha Atienza (b. 1981, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Bantayan Island Philippines) is a Dutch-Filipino video artist exploring the format’s ability to document and question issues related to the environment, community, and development. Born to a Dutch mother and Filipino father, Atienza has navigated between these cultures throughout her life, and the oscillation between the two significantly influence her approach to observation, documentation, and the concept of the gaze. Her video is rooted in both ecological and sociological concerns as she studies the intricate interplay between local traditions, human subjectivity, and the natural world. Frequently examining her immediate surroundings, she excels in exploring the potential of art as a catalyst for societal transformation.

She won the Baloise Art Prize in Art Basel for her seminal work Our Islands in 2017. Prior to this, she was twice awarded the Ateneo Art Awards in Manila (2012/2016) and the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artist Award (2015). Recent biennales and triennials include the 17th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2022), Bangkok Art Biennale: Escape Routes, BACC, Bangkok (2020), Honolulu Biennial: To Make Wrong / Right / Now, Oahu, Hawaii (2019); and the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2018). Recent group exhibitions include An Ocean in Every Drop at the Jameel Arts Center, Dubai (2022), Breaking Water at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2022), and Animal Kingdom at Âme Nue Artspace, Hamburg (2021). Her solo exhibition The Protectors inaugurated Silverlens New York in 2022.