Photographed by Jacob Maentz for the May 2025 Issue of Vogue Philippines
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, environmental, and economic issues?
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 the studio Martha Atienza keeps 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.
Born to a Dutch mother and a Filipino sea captain from the municipality of Madridejos, Atienza’s deep ties with the coastal community of Bantayan led the impulse to document the lives of the fishermen and seafarers, many of whom she had known as classmates and neighbors. Hopping on fishing boats and spending weeks on an international cargo vessel, Atienza entered spaces that rarely welcomed women, as elder fisherfolk believed that women were bad luck.
The result of this exploration was a video piece titled “Gilubong Ang Akon Pusod Sa Dagat” [My Navel is Buried in the Sea], which was awarded the Ateneo Art Awards Fernando Zobel Prize for Visual Art in 2012. A crucial aspect of the project was the community screenings of the film, where families were given a glimpse of what their men do when they go off to sea. Some of the wives had no idea how compressor diving worked, or the dangers that seafarers face out on the open sea, like pirates and human trafficking. The film helped bridge the communication gap within the families, since the men, in traditional Filipino fashion, hardly spoke about their work. The project’s ultimate goal was to initiate dialogue among and between the two groups, reflecting the Dutch part of Atienza’s upbringing where direct communication and storytelling formed the fabric of daily life.
In 2015, Atienza hit another career milestone: her meditative video “Fair Isle,” which was filmed from a cargo ship passing by Fair Isle in Northern Scotland, was sold at Art Fair Philippines. Atienza’s mom hugged Silverlens Gallery founder Isa Lorenzo, telling her, “Now we don’t have to worry about Martha anymore!”
Atienza explains, “Now I had the freedom to fund all these things I wanted to do,” and what she wanted to do was focus on real-world solutions to the problems on the ground. Bantayan faced a convergence of crises, from climate change, the impact of destructive typhoons, the encroachment of tourism, the loss of fish stock, the degradation of the coral reef, issues which affect communities globally, but those she can grapple with through the microcosm of her island home.
Drawing on the strong social ties built and the insights gained from “Gilubong,” Atienza set out to engage the women of the community in an agricultural project that would address the problem of food insecurity and the need for sustainable livelihoods, eventually becoming the subject of the series Para Sa Aton (For Us).
Not every endeavor turned out successful, however. “I’ve made many mistakes,” she acknowledges. “After Yolanda [Supertyphoon Haiyan], we did bio-intensive farming with the wives of the seafarers and fisherfolk. And at the end, they didn’t even want to eat vegetables.” Atienza reflects that the most important lesson she learned from this initiative was recognizing the inadequacy of simply asking people what they wanted: “That answer is a long process, because these women have never been asked that before. And that led us to dive deeper into the methodology, filming together, writing together, documenting together.” This participatory process allows people to self-reflect and discover what it is they truly desire.
Deeply embedded as she was in the life of Bantayan, Atienza did not expect her video “Our Islands” to win the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel 2017. An underwater iteration of her Anito series, the 72-minute video captured the distinct Rabelaisian way that Bantayanons performed the Ati-Atihan, dressed in costumes that were more social commentary than religious homage. She had enlisted her fisher friends whom she had been collaborating with since 2010 to don their procession outfits and march under the sea. A cast of characters breathing from tubes paraded across the ocean floor: Manny Pacquiao, Jesus, an OFW, a survivor of Yolanda, a victim of the drug war. The film plunges the viewer into the silent world of our islands where terror coexists with humor, devastation with resilience, and despair with faith.
Returning to her island, Atienza was confronted with the realization that an international art award had little effect on Bantayan’s deteriorating condition. “In fact, things kept getting worse. There’s not enough fish, people are still compressor diving, families are being displaced, young people don’t even know what an intact sea looks like anymore. It was depressing, coming back and wondering what else we can do,” she says. “That’s how Goodland came about. We needed to form an official body to be heard and taken seriously, to be invited to the table.”
A commission from the Istanbul Biennial enabled Atienza, through Goodland, to coalesce the many ideas and proposals she had concerning the coast into one platform. The first Adlaw sa mga Mananagat, or Fisherfolks Day, was held on June 27, 2022 and celebrated the often overlooked fisherfolk, highlighting their crucial role in culture, food security, and marine protection. The event brought together 37 coastal communities in a parade of boats, followed by educational presentations and an open forum where stakeholders could hash out their concerns. “That was a very special event for us. We were able to push for a formal resolution, and now the government is holding the event annually,” she says. What was shown at the 17th Istanbul Biennial, and is now traveling around the world, was Atienza’s documentation of the parade, with nearly 50 fishing boats decorated with palm fronds and garlands of recycled plastic bottles crossing the sea. It was raining heavily that day, which locals believed to be a blessing.
“Just because the issues are so big doesn’t mean the projects have to be so big.”
Though incremental progress was being made, Atienza felt she was reaching a point of burnout. One December, feeling particularly exhausted, she called up Marian Pastor-Roces, whom she had met at a climate conference. They had a long conversation about the concerns she was having over running an organization, the time and money it entails, and whether she was even going about it the right way. “I loved what she told me. Just because the issues are so big doesn’t mean the projects have to be so big.”
Atienza has since relocated from Madridejos and the coast to inland Bihiya, a vital watershed area that her family has spent two decades protecting and rehabilitating. From a denuded stretch of barren land, Bihiya is now verdant with trees. It is within these remote hills where she built her studio, now working with students on the living archive, and refining Goodland’s methodology so that it can serve as a working model for other communities.
Soon, she will need to put her artist’s hat back on and create something for her upcoming exhibition with Silverlens this November. It will be a departure from her oceanic oeuvre and a pivot to inland and farmland issues. “Looking back, I’ve been so intensely working on coastal communities and the sea, it also became a sort of comfort zone, and now to work with a very different landscape is kind of scary in a sense,” Atienza says. For years, her work has been explicitly linked to the sea and to islands. But she emphasizes that watersheds represent an equally vital part of the island ecosystem. What’s important is that she has once again found the joy in what she does, something she says she had lost to burnout and frustration.
Last July, in an epic Midnight Moment that submerged Times Square in the Visayan Sea, “Our Islands” was screened nightly on electronic billboards that spanned 41st to 48th streets in New York City. On the opening night, Atienza told her mom, “I think people are more interested in hot dogs.” But they returned on subsequent nights, trying to get a sense of the space and how people took it all in. When she went back home, the whole island of Bantayan congratulated her like a returning hero. “I finally made it because I made it to Times Square,” she laughs.
Witnessing how this global acclaim resonated with the people back home prompted Atienza to reconsider the power of the art world as a platform for change. “How do we make it useful?” she asks. “It’s easy to get attention, but wouldn’t it be better to offer a solution? Maybe what we need is more action.”
She recalls another piece of advice that changed her perspective, offered by the Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann when both led Silverlens New York’s inaugural exhibition. “She said to me, ‘You have to look at it this way: we’re enablers.” I-Lann was referring to their visibility as women and Southeast Asian artists, blazing trails for others to be seen and recognized.
Integrating artistic practice with community development, Atienza is beginning to find the answers to her questions as she moves between the worlds of international galleries and fishing vessels, art fairs and agricultural farms, “Martha Atienza” the artist and Martha Atienza the islander, finding the good in both the land and the sea.
By AUDREY CARPIO. Photographs by JACOB MAENTZ. Producer: Bianca Zaragoza.
