Filmmaker Shireen Seno experiments with
different mediums, including photography, publication and installation. She is also an active member of a new artist collective, Tito & Tita. (Interviewed on November 5, 2013, in Quezon
City, Philippines, Interviewer: Mayumi Hirano)
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We met for the first time in Japan, when you were visiting your family in
Tokyo. What brought you back to your parents’ home country, the Philippines after growing up in
Japan?
It took some time and quite a bit of distance to get here. After high
school in Japan, I went to Canada to study architecture. I came across Kidlat
Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare in the public library
and through the internet, I started reading about all sorts of wonderful films
coming from the Philippines. As much as I wanted to watch them, only a select
few were being shown. Around the same time, I began to wonder what I was doing
in Canada.
After finishing my studies, I decided to move back to Tokyo. I realized that everything you see in Japan related to the Philippines is stereotypical, one-dimensional documentary fare, the kind of stuff that would make people feel sorry for our country. I wanted to show much more than this. In 2007, I came here to see for myself.
In Manila, I found that people were making amazing stuff,
regardless of the money. They were just finding a way to do it, and the energy
was infectious. I was invited to shoot photographs during the production of Lav
Diaz’s Melancholia,
and I guess that was how I began to find my place in the film community. It
really felt like a community, where resources and ideas were passed around with
food and beer. And this sense of making films not to make money but to make
sense of things. I felt part of something bigger than myself, and everyone kept
telling me to do my own thing. I moved here in 2009.
That’s how you started focusing
on making your own film. Will you tell me about your first feature film, Big
Boy (2012)?
Big Boy is a portrait of a family growing up in Mindoro after the Second
World War, based on stories my father used to tell me when I was growing up in
Tokyo. For me it was like another world, and I held onto these images in my
head. When I finally started to write them down from memory, I asked my father
to retell them, and it was so different from the way I had envisioned them all
along.
I liked the idea that memory can change spontaneously and doesn't always
make sense. I decided to shoot on Super 8, a small film format where the frame
is 8mm wide, which makes the image very grainy when enlarged. I wanted to work
with the materiality and immateriality of memory. A memory of a memory.
I also wanted to say something about images and
image-making. There is always this idea of not being happy with how we appear,
of wanting to look like more western. It’s
definitely tied to years of being colonized, of looking up to others. I also
wanted to relate this to the process of growing up and coming into your own. My
parents seemed to have it all worked out for me: I would go to college in the US, and I would get a job, and I would support them so we can all move to the US. And I felt like, do I even have a say in this? I think Filipinos tend to think of America as the center of the world, or a movie with a happy ending. The idea of this film was personal but I was also thinking of bodies, of family, of history.
You are also part of the collective Tito & Tita. How did it start?
With film, you look for people whom you can turn to for their skills, but
it’s just as important to find people whom you feel
comfortable with. During the shoot, you’re with each other for long stretches of time. They become family. With ‘Big Boy’, I bonded with a group of people who are all quite young, mostly younger
than I am, and each with their own character. Individually, everyone has their
own thing to say, but we came together and made this film and since then,
several more.
So Tito & Tita came from this process of working together and wanting
to let go and make something out of fun. I’m naturally a control freak, so for me, it was definitely a challenge to
let go. Tito & Tita is as much about enjoying each other’s company as doing things we can’t do on our own.
We had a residency at Green Papaya Art Projects in July 2013. We weren't sure
what we were going to do, but in the end we came together, spending time in and
out of that space.
“Casual Encounters” was the title of the residency / project at Green
Papaya.
We have this impulse to be playful, even naughty. There’s this section of
Craigslist (an international buy-and-sell website) called Casual Encounters. It’s a section for
people wanting to meet people. For casual sex. They post photos of themselves,
some are casual and others are overtly sexual.
We decided to use
photos posted on Craigslist Manila’s Casual Encounters section with locations
specific to Green Papaya’s
actual location: Kamuning, Scout area, Cubao, Quezon City. We projected them on
the wall as a slide show, installed a silver pole in the middle of the space,
and hung a darkroom timer on the wall and a neon ‘Casual Encounters’ sign in the front window, not unlike the sex shops and bars down the
street.
We also made a
peephole in the door of the closet behind a wall, where we installed a light
box with a photo of a half-naked guy posing for the camera. It was a photo we
encountered while researching for ‘Big Boy’
in
Mindoro. The guy in the photo was the son of the town photographer.
On the closing
night of our residency, we played classic bar songs and gave out unique
editions of what we called a ‘single-frame zine’, consisting of a negative enclosed in a slide
frame.
Was the show at Green Papaya the first project for Tito & Tita? I’m also curious about the name of the group. It
means uncle and aunt, right?
Our first project was in 2012, when Yason Banal curated our show ‘Tito & Tita’ at the Ishmael Bernal Gallery at the U.P. Film Center.
Yes,
it means ‘Uncle
& Aunt’. The name came naturally because we actually do
call each other “Tito”
and “Tita”.
One of us became a father when he was quite young, so we were are all tito’s
and tita’s
already. Beyond that, I guess we were sick of the whole idea of promoting yourself. That's why we don't name any names. With film and art and anything I guess, it's all about who's who.
How many people are in the group? Are all of you filmmakers?
It’s a loose collective, and we’re open to others we happen to connect with. There are a
few constants, but it just depends on who comes together at the time. We happen
to be filmmakers who also work with photography, installation, performance, not
just film.
Do you expect Tito & Tita to have a long life?
That’s the point — to stir up something together while we’re alive.
What’s the upcoming project for
Tito & Tita?
We have a solo show in Manila this July, and an upcoming screening at Echo
Park Film Center in Los Angeles. After Casual Encounters in 2013, we exhibited in Ayala Museum as a part of
‘Media Art Kitchen’ organized by the Japan Foundation.
This year, we were invited to participate in two group shows: one at Blanc
Gallery, the other at Silverlens Gillman Barracks in Singapore. ‘Hang ‘Em High’, the group show at Blanc,
was related to the idea of The Western. We ended up hanging a series of framed
photographic prints, accompanied by an edited video, of behind-the-scenes
footage that we took while shooting a Filipino Western short film called ‘Shotgun Tuding’ in December. Shooting, like any form of work, can get tiring, and we
wanted to express a sense of the process and the humor in it, without showing
the film itself.
At Silverlens in Singapore, we were part of a group show called ‘The Shadow Factory’, exhibiting the work of artists who work in collectives or under
different names. We showed our short film ‘Class Picture’ as a loop, projected onto a wall in the gallery. The film shows a group of students posing for a class picture on the beach, with the waves rolling in and fazing out. Shot using a single roll of expired 16mm film stock, only silhouettes can be made out.
I see. Both the film community and art community here are quite small. The
sense of competition can be an extra stress that doesn’t necessarily bring out a positive result. Money
can be another tricky factor for the life of collective.
So far, we’re been splitting the costs
of materials and then pooling together any incoming money for future projects.
It helps that we don't have a fixed space which we’d have to pay to maintain.
In the process of making a film as a collective, how do you negotiate each
other?
If someone disagrees with something, we talk about it and drink. For us,
making film and art is not about making money. It’s to keep making and surprising ourselves.
For most of the visual artists, the means to make living is to sell the
artworks. I guess filmmakers work with a different economic system.
Moving images cannot be sold so easily. But the work can be reproduced and
exhibited again and again, traveling to different festivals and contexts. So
your name gets around, and that’s your capital, just like with visual art. Now locals are paying more
attention to the films that are independently produced outside of the big
studios/networks. There are more local funding bodies, so more independent
films are being made… there just aren’t many cinemas here that will screen films that don’t make money, only the cinemas and classrooms of
universities and cultural institutions. I’d like to see more galleries open to screening films.
Shireen Seno is a lens-based artist whose work addresses
ideas of memory, history, and image-making, often in relation to nature and
home. She has had two solo exhibitions in Manila and received international
recognition for her Super-8 feature film Big Boy (2012). Her photo zine Trunks,
published during a residency at Objectifs Centre for Photography &
Filmmaking in Singapore, has been exhibited at MoMA, the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Los Angeles, and the Tokyo Art Book Fair.
© Shireen
Seno and Mayumi Hirano