Cocoy Lumbao

Selected for AFI '25 by Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila.

What compels you to work with moving image, and when did you first become interested in this medium?
I consider myself a visual artist who is not endowed with skills like painting and drawing. Videomaking and other lens-based media made a lot of sense for expressing ideas visually, I became first interested in the medium when I was in college studying under the film program of the university and got disillusioned with the direction of the course towards industry-oriented outputs: like the big studios and glossy cinema and illusionistic narratives.

Can you speak about the potential that dreaming and altered states of reality offer individuals and societies? How do you feel this is reflected in filmmaking and in your artwork specifically?
Dreaming has always the potential to show the ‘other’ or the ‘other than this’ scenario. Which can also translate loosely to ‘criticality’ or in being critical against the status quo. One can go as far as to say ‘Dreaming’ is a form of critique. In my artworks, the dreaming state moves towards a ‘nostalgic state,’ to find sense in the present, and to open critical ideas about the present.

Please share a list of books, music, films, artworks, thinkers, spaces, and places that inspire your practice, and in particular have fed into your thinking about this film.
Most influential to me are the writings of the critic Walter Benjamin—reflected in his two books, ‘Illuminations’ and ‘Reflections,’ where essays about art, authorship, and culture are included. The film that changed my view into art and image-making was Michael Snow’s 1967 film called ‘Wavelength,’ which was a long-single slow zooming take set inside a room.

What new projects or lines of research are currently preoccupying you?
My constant preoccupation in terms of research has always been about ‘video art’ and their inherent properties that separate them from film, cinema, and other moving image media. I also try to locate critical points where the notions of decolonization and nationalism are possible to be reflected against local video art practices and other attempts in using video by artists in the field of Fine Arts and visual arts.