The Soil and the Daylight Recognize Me was shown at the School of Image Arts as part of Maximum Exposure 29: Beyond the Surface.
Whether something is natural is used to actualize that something is true. The earth beneath our feet, solid and real, affirms its truth through its naturalness, as does the sun that shines every day. Similarly, our bodies, tangible and palpable, validate their truth by their very nature. These are things that can be seen and touched and felt, therefore they exist. This is the timeless evaluation methodology that we continue to legitimize mere existence.
But if something has to be felt to be true, what do you make of something that only you feel because it is felt within, and therefore cannot be seen? When I tell you I don’t feel like a man, nor a woman, is that statement true to you? When I say that my conception of my gender is akin to holding cornstarch and water in my hands, to the rhythmic expansion and contraction of a lung, or a beating heart that speeds up and slows down, does it carry the same weight? Even if you can’t see it in any way other than through the clothes I choose to wear, or the length of my hair, or the shape of my body, can you see it to be true like the earth we walk on, or the sun that illuminates your mornings and afternoons?
Does the truth have to be singular and finite?
The Soil and the Daylight Recognize Me is an attempt to answer the questions I ponder in my ever-growing relationship with my tempestuous gender identity. In the backdrop of my motherland marred by rampant transphobia, a legacy of Spain’s colonial Catholic indoctrination and imposed norms perceives trans individuals in the Philippines as fundamentally unnatural (thus untrue). Despite this, the existence of transgender individuals predates our colonizers’ arrival. It is as timeless as the sun and the earth. Precolonial ideas surrounding gender existed outside the singular constructs of it that our colonizers imposed onto us. Gender was perceived as existing plurally, in multiplicities. Trans people continue to live in multiplicities, asking ourselves, “What can this body become? What can I become?”
The Soil and the Daylight Recognize Me, manifested in cyanotype portraits of my trans Filipino friends on clay tiles, becomes a testament to this multiplicity. Through the merging of earthly materials and UV light, these portraits act as “natural evidence” of my friends’ identities, fragmented yet whole, affirming their truth in a world that often seeks to confine it to singular and finite constructs.