Forage Friction is an immersive, experimental sound/cinema art installation, film, and performance project exploring foraging practices of pre-colonial and pagan traditions within conflicted histories. Situated in a spiritual alloy of pre-colonial cosmologies, the project follows the narratives of plants: their uprooting, transformation, and role in forming communities through ritual acts of collective healing. Using a sensorial approach to expanded cinema with sonic pieces, Forage Friction constructs a cinematic topography where human, ecological, and spiritual systems are entangled.
Rather than centering human protagonists, the project privileges the agency of plants. It traces their life cycle, revealing how they mediate cultural knowledge, ritual identity, and ecological resilience. Foraging becomes a cinematic metaphor for excavation—of forgotten epistemologies, endangered methodologies, and relationships to place. We aim to blur distinctions between subject and environment, viewer and ritual, metric and myth. Techniques include field recordings, contact microphones, phytochemical film processing, computer synthesis, and experimental filmmaking. We call this a “moving image topography”—a dynamic, living archive mapping biodiversity loss and cultural memory.
The visual and sonic style is intentionally unstable, shifting between documentary observation and ritual embodiment. Filming includes handheld vérité, macro under-skin imagery, infrared and soil-buried cameras, and sequences of dreamlike montage. These intercut with “conversational stunts”: poetic dialogues between foragers and plants, recited in situ to unmoor linguistic and cultural binaries.
The first iteration of Forage Friction took place in Siquijor, Philippines, following a collective of families led by Noel and Juanita Torremocha, shamans of the mountain village of Cantabon. The project tracked an annual pilgrimage of plants and people, integrating their harvest into alchemical transmutations where foraged plants developed 16mm film through phytochemical processes—the celluloid embodying the subject matter. These abstract moving image materials became cinema works, audiovisual performances, and installations.
Forage Friction is a multisite, multiform project led by Tengal and Elvin Brandhi alongside collaborators Jules Leaño, Jippy Pascua, and more.
Short Bio:
AUTO-AUDIO-DIDACTIC DUO ELVIN BRANDHI AND TENGAL EMITTING EAR TO EYE FRICTIONS THAT RESONATE RECIPROCITY. A CONFLUENCE OF UNSCORED TANGENTS AND SECANTS CONDUCTED THROUGH SYNTH / SAMPLE / VOCIFERATION.
Long Bio:
Tengal Drilon is a Filipino artist-filmmaker, curator and cultural producer whose cross-disciplinary works span video, sound, installation, and analog film, with roots in community-based and experimental cinema/sound. Elvin Brandhi is a Welsh audiovisual and performance artist who weaves narratives from field recordings, found footage, and improvisation. Together, we merge ecological, sonic, and ritual practices into collaborative works. Together, we carry a shared ethic of artistic responsibility: to listen before we frame, to dwell before we edit, produce, or capture.
Our artistic endeavors are centered on risk-taking, and personal interaction between collaborators and audience—emphasizing the situational potential of new possibilities. our interests span the half-life and migration of ideas, images, sounds, and spices, and how they sometimes become an essential part of localities and specific cultural landscapes. Our projects are driven by three core values: access, emancipation, and transformation. These projects attempt to tease out propositions and alternatives through off-tangents and fuzzy juxtapositions, aiming at new knowledge production and discovery. Sound is our primary medium, but we expand it forward through the use of experimental and expanded cinema, often manipulating auditory and visual elements, combining a sense of aesthetic with how time-based elements interact in spaces, communities, even nature. Our works express our fascination with sound through various technologies, including mechanical instruments, computer technologies, acoustic phenomena, and forgotten technologies.
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