About the project
Period
2020-ongoing
Location
Bantayan Island, Philippines
External links
Proposed by
Zoe Butt
GOODLand is an artist-led and community-based platform co-founded in 2020 by Martha Atienza and her brother Jake Atienza on Bantayan Island in the Philippines. Its mission is to empower island communities to achieve self-sufficiency, resilience, and a high quality of life within an ecologically balanced environment. Bringing together artists, fishers, farmers, local authorities, and partner organisations, GOODLand uses art as a catalyst for social and environmental transformation, fostering dialogue, collective action, and sustainable forms of development.
Through research, education, and participatory practices, GOODLand supports local knowledge systems and strengthens the cultural and environmental heritage of the Bisayan and Bantayanon communities. Working closely with intergenerational fisherfolk, the platform functions as a living archive, collecting physical and audiovisual materials that document local histories, struggles, and forms of resilience. These archives serve both as a record of community experience and as a resource for imagining and shaping future initiatives.
GOODLand is deeply engaged in environmental stewardship, conceiving the seabed as a submerged forest in urgent need of protection. The platform addresses critical issues such as marine conservation, waste management, food security, and sustainable livelihoods, while responding to the growing impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels and the increasing frequency of super typhoons. Through critical approaches to the reuse of plastic waste polluting the oceans, and by co-creating new rituals and collective practices of care for the waters that sustain island communities, GOODLand promotes new forms of ecological awareness and collective responsibility.
Acting simultaneously as a living museum and an experimental laboratory, GOODLand transforms community conversations and collective dreaming into tangible outcomes. By integrating art, research, and civic participation, the platform develops innovative responses to complex social, environmental, and economic challenges, while contributing to a new shared imaginary around the Philippine archipelago, one of the regions most vulnerable to the climate crisis.
About the artist
Martha Atienza (b. 1981, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Bantayan Island Philippines) is a Dutch-Filipino video artist exploring the format’s ability to document and question issues related to the environment, community, and development. Born to a Dutch mother and Filipino father, Atienza has navigated between these cultures throughout her life, and the oscillation between the two significantly influence her approach to observation, documentation, and the concept of the gaze. Her video is rooted in both ecological and sociological concerns as she studies the intricate interplay between local traditions, human subjectivity, and the natural world. Frequently examining her immediate surroundings, she excels in exploring the potential of art as a catalyst for societal transformation.
She won the Baloise Art Prize in Art Basel for her seminal work Our Islands in 2017. Prior to this, she was twice awarded the Ateneo Art Awards in Manila (2012/2016) and the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artist Award (2015). Recent biennales and triennials include the 17th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2022), Bangkok Art Biennale: Escape Routes, BACC, Bangkok (2020), Honolulu Biennial: To Make Wrong / Right / Now, Oahu, Hawaii (2019); and the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2018). Recent group exhibitions include An Ocean in Every Drop at the Jameel Arts Center, Dubai (2022), Breaking Water at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2022), and Animal Kingdom at Âme Nue Artspace, Hamburg (2021). Her solo exhibition The Protectors inaugurated Silverlens New York in 2022.
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