Exquisite Crops: Stephanie Comilang’s Science Fiction Documentaries

By calling it “science fiction documentary,” Stephanie Comilang points out the co-constitutive valences of her filmmaking practice. On the one hand, she leans toward what could be more specifically characterized as speculative nonfiction, which narrativizes reality as an ongoing process of actualization, highlighting its potentials for mutability. On the other, she uses the tropes of genre fiction to contextualize widespread imaginaries of advanced technoscientific futures within the historical and material circumstances of past and present cultures and societies.

Piña, Why Is the Sky Blue? (2022), a collaborative project by Comilang and Simon Speiser, traces the historical trajectory of the pineapple plant across the Pacific to explore the entangled afterlives of Spanish colonization in Ecuador and the Philippines. First brought to Southeast Asia from the tropical Americas in the late sixteenth century, this plant shares a name—piña—in both countries. The film is partially narrated from the perspective of an eponymous techno-deity—an omniscient, invisible presence whose hovering viewpoint is conveyed through a drone-mounted camera. Piña is epistemic survival incarnate: a collective intellect emerging from inherited knowledges and generational memories. They channel what we know of as machine learning techniques through rituals that rewire the evolving networks of Indigenous thought and praxis across space and time.

We are introduced to the Cyber Amazonas, a grassroots collective that uses radio broadcasting and digital publishing for land rights advocacy and community organizing in the Quichua-speaking regions of Ecuador. Deep in the rainforest, they are shown uploading wisdom to the Piñasphere—setting afloat on streams of water pieces of lustrous, lace-like cloth bearing 3D-printed designs, including stepped Otavalo motifs, electronic circuits, honeycomb Solihiya patterns, and cloud architecture. This type of fabric, also known as piña, has been produced for centuries in the Philippines and traded globally. Woven from pineapple leaf fibers, it was adapted from older weaving traditions that originally employed the archipelago’s native abacá leaves.

We also meet Alba Pavón, an Afro-descendant community leader and women’s rights activist from Quito, who reflects on the deep cultural and social roots of her forebears in South America following their experience of displacement and enslavement. She shares her ancestral knowledge of botanicals and their healing properties—eucalyptus, chilca, dandelion, and Santa María feverfew—which she practices and transmits through syncretic ceremonies performed in and around pools, ponds, springs, and other bodies of water close to her marginalized neighborhood of Caminos a la Libertad.

So, why is the sky blue, Piña? The answer, perhaps, lies not only in the physics of light scattering, but in a mythopoetic logic, where the pineapple, among other plants, does more than photosynthesize: it mediates sunlight and becomes a sun of its own, illuminating a historical horizon. From one end of the globe to another, it emanates a nurturing light that refracts through layered atmospheres of time, empire, and trade. Yet Piña might also remind us that the sky is not truly blue, but only appears so—its color the result of our limited range of vision, which requires high-tech aids like VR headsets to catch even a glimpse of the deity itself.

Verbal and visual affinities between modernity and what is deemed premodern have often served to legitimize exploitative transitions from Indigenous cultural expression to digital industrial labor. In the late 1960s, Fairchild Semiconductor—one of Silicon Valley’s formative companies—invoked this logic at its assembly plant in Shiprock, New Mexico, where promotional materials drew pseudomorphic parallels between the designs of Navajo textiles and electronic circuits. Technically “a kind of colonialism in reverse,” this rhetoric helped recast industrial manufacture as an act of cultural preservation, and frame Indigenous women as naturally fit for making microchips because of their perceived cultural identity.¹ Under the banner of economic self-sufficiency, the groundwork for global digital infrastructure was laid through the vulnerable conditions of containment and immobility on Native land.

“Communication doesn’t mean staying within four walls,” says a member of the Cyber Amazonas. “[It] means going into different communities.” Far from a techno-utopian claim, her statement exposes the politics of embodiment under communicative capitalism, where information is imagined as free-floating—even as it depends on the immobilized labor of racialized subjects. The circulation of commodified information often relies on the containment of the very bodies that produce it through communication. Comilang not only documents these dynamics but also speculates on how they might be reinvested with Indigenous agency, recultivating the digital as a site of material resistance and reclamation.

^NOTES

¹ Lisa Nakamura, “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture,” in American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (December 2014): 931.

Mahan Moalemi is a writer from Tehran, currently pursuing doctoral studies at Harvard University. He has edited a volume of collected essays on ethnofuturisms and has written for magazines such as Art in America, Cabinet, and Domus; platforms like MoMA’s post; and several exhibition catalogues, artist monographs, and academic anthologies.