Herzog, Kidlat and Enrique Marty have a cosmic encounter
Kidlat Tahimik never arrives without a story, or a series of props. For his participation in “Wolves at the Door. Cosmic Encounters,” a “proposal” by Salamanca, Spain artist Enrique Marty made specifically for the Instituto Cervantes de Manila, the National Artist arrives in native Igorot garb, brandishing a tiny metal movie camera, as well as a bamboo one (his own invention), and later a carved statuette of Jose Rizal wearing a loincloth. The theme of “indio-genius” is thick in the air.
Animations and watercolor storyboards by Marty (who couldn’t attend the Manila opening, but was at Ateneo Gallery last August to present his recent exhibit, “Project Belonging: From There to Here”) surround us, as does Tahimik, who doesn’t have to try hard to put his imprint on things: he even appears in Marty’s art, popping up as a shaman character in one of his short video-essays from a long-germinating series entitled “All your world is pointless.”
The screened episode, titled “Wolves at the Door,” involves German teenager Kaspar Hauser, who appeared in a public square in Nuremberg in 1828, unable or unwilling to speak or stand. He was “adopted” by the town, and later, adopted by German director Werner Herzog as the titular character for 1974’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser—which featured, by some quirk of fate or coincidence, a young Kidlat Tahimik in his first acting role.
On the other side of the room is a screen running “Cosmic Encounters,” an excerpt from a video conversation between Spain-based architect Kristine Guzmán, Marty and Tahimik done at his Baguio studio in August 2024. In it, we see how their work interconnects, almost coincidentally. (There’s a QR code you can scan to view the full 30-minute video.)
Marty’s work exorcises a disquieting otherness, whether it’s quick-painted studies of family Polaroids in domestic settings, or implied violence, or exhibits focused on circus sideshow freaks. (“Enrique is always trying to turn the tables,” notes Guzmán, “questioning, who is looking at whom? Like in a zoo: you’re looking at the animals, but they’re also looking at you.”) The work also reflects a way of exorcising a troubled family history.
Tahimik has long positioned his work in awareness of otherness—from first feature Perfumed Nightmare, to his exhibit for the Quincentennial at the Crystal Palace in Madrid in 2021, which, back in the same location in 1887, paraded about indigenous peoples at the General Exhibition of the Philippines like a human zoo. His bamboo camera and loinclothed Rizal are also attempts to subvert and apply ju-jitsu moves to those colonial narratives, even employing the term “indio-genius” to replace the Western stamp of “indigneous.”
The homemade quality of each artist’s work is part of the point. “The similarity I see is they both work by chance, using what’s in front of them,” says Guzmán. (It’s a trait shared by Herzog as well, come to think of it.)
In “Wolves at the Door,” crude animated skeletons and versions of Kasper Hauser converge in a Nuremberg dungeon. “It’s a medieval death dance—a party of death,” says Marty in the “Cosmic Encounters” video. “Kasper is myself.” Kasper prefers the comfort of his cell, but he’s sent to a desert, where he finds a “shaman”—Kidlat—in a cave with a Rizal altar, playing a flute.
Tahimik tells a few stories about working with Herzog, how it all came together by chance. He’d just finished trying to sell capiz souvenirs at the 1972 Munich Olympics when all hell broke loose: the Israeli hostage crisis, helicopters overhead. Left with a lot of unsold capiz Dachshunds, and no desire to return to his economist gig in Paris, he holed up in a German commune with other artists (including his future wife Kartrin), and ended up in a German film student’s short film.
“We were going to (rehearse it) in front of his professor, but he was sick,” recalls Kidlat. Instead, the substitute professor was— just by chance —Herzog.
“Werner said (in Herzog accent), ‘Are you a professional actor?’ No, I’m just playing with a friend. ‘Ah, good. I don’t like professional actors.’ I thought he was imagining Klaus Kinski when he said this.”
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Next thing Kidlat knew, Herzog showed up at the commune and offered him a part. That summer they filmed in a town near Nuremberg.
The film carries on in Aguirre tradition: Western men battling against nature, people from the outside consumed by their surrounding reality. Kidlat played a nose flute, “because I couldn’t play any other wood instrument,” he laughs.
Marty presents Tahimik as a shaman in his animated short. The shaman, muses Tahimik, “maybe creates a spark of indio-genius. That’s better than everything being pre-planned. And now AI is trying to put cosmic things together… mechanically.”
He mentions how language can reflect a buried colonized view, such as the phrase “Bahala na,” often thought of as a dismissive shrug at the fates.
“I think the term originally comes from ‘bathala,’” notes Tahimik. “It means leaving it to the heavens, the final outcome is up to the spirits. Maybe the same way a shaman works. But it doesn’t mean ‘do nothing.’ I think that stops local people from doing their best, being creative, because they lose incentive. But if you do everything in your power—your brain, brawn, soul—to bring it there, and in the end, you have to say, ‘bathala na,’ I think that’s the original way of thinking about it. You still do your best, you’re not oppressed by the colonizer, and your outcome is an interaction between you and the upper worlds.”
And that’s perhaps how both artists manage to keep the wolves from crashing down the door.
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“Wolves at the Door. Cosmic Encounters” is showing until Dec. 4 at Instituto Cervantes, 385 Real St., Intramuros, Manila — part of its “Espacios Ocupados” program, which “articulates trajectories in different directions to relate Spanish-speaking artists with contexts, cultural agents and places where the centers of the Cervantes Institute network are located.”
