Raya Martin’s early experimental independent films pose questions about postcolonial identity as well as the broader ramifications of Filipino colonial history. He often reimagines scenes from the Philippine Revolution, which was fought against Spanish colonial rule in the 1890s, as well as the country’s American occupation during the early twentieth century by using early cinema editing techniques and handpainted backdrops to evoke the prevailing modes of filmmaking contemporaneous with those eras. In Ars Colonia, a oneminute short commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Martin replicates the handcolored style of early silent films to restage the transient moment of a conquistador fixing his gaze upon an island that he is about to invade. The work’s handheld camera perspective proposes a surreal scenario in which sixteenthcentury conquistadors had actually used camera technology in order to document their initial encounters with the lands which they would violently reshape into their own European image.
