MANUEL OCAMPO: LA BUENA VIDA
La Buena Vida looks into “The Kariton”, a pushcart popular in Filipino culture, which has been used to peddle goods by small scale traders and merchants. These traders would roam around their communities and offer goods: from coconut to vegetables and plants. Alternatively, it is also used by junk shops to collect materials, which will be recycled and reused. In this performance, the pushcart contains several objects and materials transformed into art forms. “La Buena Vida” (The Good Life), looks at the parallelism of issues that concern the current state of arts and culture in a country where private and public spaces are usually defined by status and social class.
MANUEL OCAMPO (b. 1965) has been a vital presence on the international art scene for over twenty- five years, with a reputation for fearlessly tackling the taboos and cherished icons of society and of the art world itself. He had an extended residency in California in the late 1980s and early 1990s and continues to spend significant time working in both the US and Europe. His works were featured thrice at the Venice Biennials (1993, 2001, 2017) with the recent one representing the Philippine Pavilion.
