Unpublished notes number 1

Bea Camacho
Blind Transmission
Small Gallery, CCP
16 March 16 April 2006

Blind Transmission hints at an act propelled by compulsion, done out of habit, without much control and whose recipient of such act may or may not be made aware of it happening, like echoing out one’s voice through desolate mountain ranges, its reverb may be the only thing that can be heard until the last of it fades. Space conscripts the distance between sender and receiver, but it is of a mutable dimension dependent upon language and form.

In art, space is relational, ascertained by the distance between artist and audience which may either be collapsed through a work’s participatory structure or further reinforced instead by its overt determinism. Speaking in a conceptual language Bea Camacho complicates further these polemics as she constantly redefines its concurrent dichotomies – between presence and absence, perception and cognition, divulgement and concealment, the public and the private, the mobile and the static. These are presented in formats whose factuality is essentially conceded to – photographs, videos, title cards. But the site of dislocation the works may pose is intermittently centered on her body, and where an amorphous space is constantly being reconfigured. The process by which she attends to her works bore the rituals of settlement and departure : packing, unpacking, crocheting, unraveling, homecoming. Moreover, the very memorialization of each of these acts which undermines how these are perceived are mostly done by proxy – for the actual objects now boxed, for the performances that are framed in stilled permanence. Their re-staging here at CCP is their reverberation.




“The fact that the work does not remain creates an urgency to see it.” (Christo) Camacho’s Packing Project deftly exemplifies this as towards the end of the show she will be gradually packing up all the artworks, leaving “empty spaces where they used to be.” Their being kept away, stored, ready for shipping somewhere else, perhaps to another gallery reflects her state of constant mobility, a “resistance to attachment” and thriving on a “provisional existence”, a mode of survival and/or adaptation to one’s isolation as continually being in a different environment.

Enclose, a video documentation of an 11-hour performance where she crocheted herself into a cocoon with thick red yarn continuously with no breaks for water or food, invokes Christo’s wrappings in her use of a soft material for a temporary refuge. Towards the end, she disappears into a red biomorphic form, signaling the end of the task, which is repeated again once the play button is pushed. Her crocheting thus becomes an infinite ritual, becoming permanently encased in her spun cocoon thence emerging to begin the task anew, her video image “. . . simultaneously coming into being and vanishing. . . and having no precise point of her being fully present.” But the extent of her being fully present in this performance is also predicated on the technological condition/limitation of the recording device used. Repeated playing may contribute to a gradual generation loss, or as with the case of CDs, DVDs the pixilation and further compression of digital data, thereby losing their materiality by repeated showing yet buttressed further into memory. The performance as it’s screened, the term itself, implies its duplicity – to broadcast and to filter, to cloak, aside from being a surface for image projection.

Prior to Enclose, Camacho has also employed crochet in her other works such as Red Hats, Extensions, and her untitled sound objects. It is a craft invoking intimacy yet its execution is based on a pattern of knots that are quite precise, the produced network reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome.

If Enclose is utter retreat to one’s self, Extensions are protrusions of personal space, her attempts to encroach another space by touch. But these Extensions, fleshlike in color and woven like anomalous pairs of gloves, slacken to the ground, limp and heavy; they’re sack-like in one, the other pair curving back to her own hand, as though gravity grounds her to stay. As she is posed in her photograph wherein she wears them, this is where she will remain, as an image.

In Red Hats, her remembrance of family members co-relates to her physical distance from them. The red pompoms hanging down from each hat is a projection of her presence, evidenced by photographs of her family wearing them. In one show, these hats were hung in correspondence to each family member’s height, inversely projecting their presence in the gallery. But the sizes of the hats are mere estimates, not exact equivalents.

Although not included in this show, Twelve Hours Ahead similarly embodies her distance from her parents through a phone tapped into the gallery’s lines. Their presence is only indicated by a light on the answering machine for the messages they have left for her. But she may not have been there all the time to receive their calls hence it is a misplaced transaction, a failed correspondence.

In Secret, Camacho’s disembodied voice is dispersed in a wider field, broadcast on air or to someone who may chance upon their radio waves within a 10m radius from the gallery a recording of her own secrets. But the gallery bares only the physical evidence of its making or the source of its transmission - a CD player and a radio transmitter. No radio receiver is provided. The probability of hearing the recording may just as well be a probability for the player may not have anything playing on it, that these may all have been props to the very idea of having one’s secrets being let out in the open. Just as in Twelve Hours Ahead, her parents may not have called her at all in the gallery. Both these works completion is anchored on merely being aware of what it is all about, imagined for their possible outcome. In the case of Homecoming, it is the trace of the marching band’s sole performance on the show’s opening, represented by a music sheet on a conductor’s music stand. Sound is thence invoked mentally through the notes of the piece they played, rather imparted, to be embodied by another voice.


Blind Transmission is Bea Camacho’s first exhibit here in Manila. She recently graduated with honors from her course in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University and where she was also conferred an Albert Alcalay award and the David McCord Prize for Achievement in the Arts.

Blind Transmission will open on March 16 Thursday at 6PM and will be on view until the 16th of April of 2006.

This exhibit was made possible by the generous support of BPI, First Metro, and Salcon Power Corporation.