island STORY

MARTHA ATIENZA's art practice is inseparable from her work with the communities of Bantayan, with whom she asks the question: how can art address social issues?

- AUDREY CARPIO

A GROUP OF YOUNG WOMEN SIT AROUND A COMMUNAL TABLE, focused intently on their laptops, while diagrams, maps, and flowcharts adorn the wall. It’s a scene straight out of a tech incubator, except that a thicket of trees is visible through the open-air windows, because they are in the middle of a forest. This is Martha Atienza’s studio on Bantayan Island in Cebu, and the women, who are IT students, are working on a platform called Goodland, cataloguing data that community members have collected over the past few years.

The archive, made of field notes, audio and visual recordings, personal narratives and local knowledge, preserves information about medicinal plants and native trees, indigenous farming practices, and heirloom seeds that have been passed down. The task of the students now is to transform the knowledge from the repository into a tangible application, such as a community farm that integrates these ancestral practices, a proof of concept.

Goodland functions like an NGO, but it is also a living museum, and it is the heart of Atienza’s artistic practice. The fundamental question Atienza is asking through Goodland is how art can tackle social, environmental, and economic issues. Her methodology is inherently collaborative, forging partnerships with the LGU, NGOs, and knowledge keepers, with Bantayan serving as both experimental laboratory and target audience of Goodland’s creative output and artistic interventions.