By seeking to learn from the innovative practices of the Filipino peasantry in order to fundamentally rethink what it means to be both an artist and a citizen beyond the conditions we were dealt, SAKA engages a wide, planetary outlook, one that allows it to articulate other kinds of desires within and beyond the specificity of its aligned struggle.

The island of Negros is known as “the sugar bowl of the Philippines.” But such romantic imagery obscures a dark reality: during tiempo muerto—the “dead time” between sowing and harvesting cane—farm laborers there go without wages and food. “It is death built into the clockwork mandate of the sugar plantation,” write artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho. In an Earth Day edition of Artist Op-Eds, the duo looks to bungkalan, a movement that offers a means of survival and militant political resistance for farmer-activists who cultivate unused plots of plantation land to grow both food and community.

Co-edited with curator Victoria Sung, their essay, published online and as a print-on-demand pamphlet, is the fourteenth in the Walker Art Center’s ongoing Artist Op-Eds series.

Read “Surviving Tiempo Muerto: On Bungkalan and Peasant Resistance in the Philippines”