Himala (ᜑᜒᜋᜎ) was shown at the School of Image Arts as part of Maximum Exposure 30: Legacy.
Excerpts of Himala (ᜑᜒᜋᜎ) were shown at Artspace TMU as part of Camera Bodies, a group show curated by Maximum Exposure.
Excerpts of Himala (ᜑᜒᜋᜎ) were shown at the plumb as part of In a mother tongue, a group show curated by Gloria Wong.
Excerpts of Himala (ᜑᜒᜋᜎ) were shown at Artspace TMU as part of Camera Bodies, a group show curated by Maximum Exposure.
Excerpts of Himala (ᜑᜒᜋᜎ) were shown at the plumb as part of In a mother tongue, a group show curated by Gloria Wong.
Himala (ᜑᜒᜋᜎ), which translates to Miracle in Tagalog, responds to the colonial legacy of photography during the American colonial period in the Philippines. During this time, American scientists and photographers used the camera as an ethnographic and scientific tool to depict Indigenous Filipinos as needing American “civilization” efforts, an example of the camera’s capacity to be an instrument of propaganda. Photography’s reputation as a copier of reality (and thus a viable mode of archiving history) contrasts against speculative methods of history-keeping that have been utilized by Indigenous Filipinos and predate photography’s advent. Methods like oral tradition, dance, and material art embraced an intersubjective approach to history-keeping that focused on the community’s relationships with the land and one another. From these methods came folk stories and traditions that merged themselves with the day to day rituals and superstitions of Filipinos up until the present day.
Himala (ᜑᜒᜋᜎ) merges photography, Filipino folk culture, as well as Catholic imagery to produce portraits of my Filipino friends and acquaintances that perform some of these stories and traditions, while also subverting the camera’s colonial gaze by obscuring or hiding my subjects’ faces, a reversal to the tradition of covering one’s self while shooting on a large-format camera that American scientists and photographers would use while photographing their often naked, hypervisible subjects. Each photograph extends on certain folk stories and the figure within them by drawing upon their cultural implications made throughout Filipino history to symbolically articulate aspects of the Filipino diasporic condition; I parallel Jose Rizal’s literary interpretation of the the prominent nature spirit, Maria Makiling, and the martyrdom of Jesus Christ to visualize the environmental destruction that seasonally impacts the Philippines; a portrait of a queer man holding a Santo Nino figure and wearing an Ati-atihan dancer’s headdress symbolizes the innate relationship with queerness and Catholicism in folk culture; and the buwaya, crocodile spirits believed to carry the souls of the dead to the afterlife, is an allegory to the process of rebirth children of the diaspora experience during migration. Together, these photographic symbols produce a visual representation of Filipino identity.
The photographs are presented in lightboxes that reference stained glass windows that adorned the churches I grew up in, and are paired with banana leaves, guava leaves, and an ashtray to create a structure akin to altars used in both Catholic and animist traditions to connect with the divine and the deceased, arranged in the shape of a Lingling-o, a spiritually protective wooden amulet often worn by Filipino shamans known as babaylan. The Philippines is a country that contains multiple histories that identities, and Himala (ᜑᜒᜋᜎ) draws on this plurality of Filipino culture, while giving reverence to the complex histories and identities of the diasporic communities that my friends and I belong to today.
“An understanding of consciousness need not separate scientific from spiritual, since science simply explains the process that is made profound and personal by spiritual meaning-making.”
— Carl Lorenz Gaston Cervantes, “Philippine parapsychology”