Download Curatorial Statement (Unabridged) booklet [PDF]

In keeping with our philosophy of “decentered Philippine-centrism,” the curated exhibition “Sea, Land, Air” creates an alternative digital space for the presentation, contextualization, and interpretation of works by artists and scholars from around the world. Our attention to Filipino routes of migration and modes of labor reveals the global processes of economic and psychic transformation—both the mundane and the extraordinary—that all contemporary subjects face.

CA+T’s “Sea, Land, Air: Migration and Labor” recognizes the myriad historical processes that influence the movements and experiences of Filipinos around the globe, including the Philippines’ multiple histories of colonialism (Spain, the United States, and Japan) and the legacies of displacement that continue to resonate through to the present day. Over the summer of 2013, we will unfold “Sea, Land, Air” in groupings designed to highlight the intersections and juxtapositions of the many works collected here. In the design and content of this and future curated exhibitions, we seek to provide a virtual platform that refuses the limitations of physical space and the segregation of “art” and “scholarship.”

The Philippines today functions as what sociologist Robyn Magalit Rodriguez calls a “labor brokerage state,” a country that “actively prepares, mobilizes, and regulates its citizens for migrant work abroad.” Propelled by the state to seek work around the world, Filipinos often eke out meager livelihoods circumscribed by economic struggles and (un)documented statuses in the countries in which they find work. Yet Filipinos often continue to send remittances or balikbayan boxes full of goods from “abroad” back to kababayans [families and close friends] in the Philippines.

You may notice how our curatorial subtheme of “care” emerges throughout “Sea, Land, Air.” In this era of global flows of labor, capital, and information, Filipino laborers are bound by the signifier “flexible labor” and by the specific types of labor and job requirements for which they are trained. Filipinos so often find employment in the caregiving industry, for example, because they are (supposedly) uniquely good at it. In his now classic essay “Servicing the World,” the anthropologist Martin Manalansan writes that “Filipinos have become synonymous with the care industry across the world.” This care industry goes beyond conventional notions of care services, such as nurses or domestic workers. It encompasses a range of professions, both licit and illicit, across a spectrum of ideas of respectability. On one end of the spectrum reside the nurses, domestic helpers, and other overseas contract workers (OCWs) that the Philippine state has labeled mga bagong bayanis, or the “nation’s new heroes.” On the opposite end are those who work as sex workers in bars and clubs in foreign lands and, in this digital age, in front of web cams selling sex to a virtual global audience. Whether they are called “new heroes” or “new sexual entrepreneurs,” Filipinos indeed service the world.

“Sea, Land, Air” thus tracks how the emotional economy of the globalized family, in which Filipino families are spread across the world caring for others, is frequently at odds with the care for the self that an individual must sustain in order to endure his/her life in foreign and frequently unwelcoming settings. These affective dimensions of migration are brought to the fore in several contributors’ works. Photographs from Wawi Navarroza’s Perhaps It Was Possibly Because series (2009) convey an everyday quality in their resemblance to snapshots taken by someone in transit, perhaps by a tourist or even a migrant laborer. Her photographs project a fitting yet unsettling sense of pathos onto the concept and reality of displacement. In her more recent work And In a Moment We're Almost Pure (lava rock garden suite) (2011), Navarroza transforms a white sheet over lava boulders to look like hidden bodies on the move. The bodily forms underneath the sheet become metaphors for an absent presence that many undocumented migrants know too well. Like Navarroza’s photographs, Kat Larson and Stephanie Syjuco’s video work and site-specific installations further speak to the complexities and multilayered experiences of migrant laborers as they find ways to create and maintain shelter not only for themselves but also for those in the Philippines.

“Sea, Land, Air” also calls attention to the iconographic details associated with Filipino migrant labor. Mik Gaspay’s photorealistic painting Pacific Fleet (2008) features male-bodied people in navy uniform viewed from behind. While the men’s identities are unknown, Gaspay’s military subjects in uniform reference the anonymity of the thousands of Filipinos who enlisted during the American colonial period in the Philippines and thereafter. Like the navy uniforms, the white nurse’s cap on Filipinas “symbolically and literally became a passport to a more prosperous life for the immigrant and the family that she left behind,” as historian Catherin Ceniza Choy puts it. Writing about Jenifer K. Wofford’s series Nurse (2006-2007), Point of Departure (2007), and MacArthur Nurses (2009), Choy reads layers of struggle, the emotional and physical ambivalences that Filipinas confront in their care work, made visible in Wofford’s drawings. . Like Choy, the scholar Harrod J. Suarez reflects on the demands, myths, and complicities that enable that labor in his essay "She's Come Undone.”

Whether Filipinos work on the high seas, up in the air, or on the ground, “Sea, Land, Air” tries to connect these circuits of Filipino labor to the Philippines’ and its diaspora’s colonial and imperial histories even as the exhibition seeks to question what is truthful and what is fictional in the historical narratives of these imperial relations. Lonnie Carter’s play The Romance of Magno Rubio (2002), with Ralph Peña, is a surprisingly anti-heroic adaptation of Carlos Bulosan’s tale of seasonal migrant labors in Depression-era California. Lordy Rodriguez’s reconfigured maps, North Pole (2009) and South Pole (2009), allow us to connect our ideas about cartography to territorial colonial conquest and trade routes, while Kimberly Alidio’s poetry textually re-imagines the complex historical relationship between the Philippines and the United States. Alidio reminds us that the form of poetry generates a creative and epistemic freedom to re-inscribe alternative meanings or even reinvigorate historical experiences that would otherwise remain stagnant or missing in conventional forms of historical narrations.

Contemporary circuits of Filipino labor often mirror historical patterns of migration, yet they are colored by the speed of globalization and the demands for a larger workforce of cheap migrant labor. Claudia Liebelt, in her essay “‘We Are the Jews of Today’: Filipino Domestic Workers and the Language of Diaspora,” examine Filipinos’ negotiation of “home” and their attempts to create and sustain physical as well as sensate conceptions of “home.” In his essay “Enacting Embeddedness through the Transnational Traffic in Goods: The Case of Ilonggo OFWs in Hong Kong,” Clement Camposano writes about the transnational ties created by contract workers in Hong Kong to their points of departure in the Philippines. An aesthetic counterpart to these scholarly essays, works like Miguel Libarnes’s video installation Oath/Panatang (2012) show us the contradictions and conflicts of national allegiances that many Filipinos who have settled abroad continue to experience. Zean Cabangis’s Goat Path (2012) series literally and figuratively builds upon the accumulative nature of homemaking and building. Whose homes are pictured in Cabangis’s paintings and where are they located? What are we to make of the objects crammed ceiling high into rooms?

We take the Philippines and its diaspora as an exemplary point of departure—rather than arrival—for representing and addressing all kinds of philosophies, histories, traditions, values, and knowledges. We invite you to explore this rich cultural and political work produced by contemporary artists, writers and scholars, and we offer you this space as a place of shelter, as a place to encounter the growth that comes with the rigors and joys of genuine exchange, critique, and collaboration.

Co-curators: Jan Christian Bernabe and Sarita Echavez See

Contributors: Filomeno V. Aguilar • Kimberly Alidio • Matthew Andrews • Michael Arcega • Tanya Bindra • Jason Cabañes • Zean Cabangis • Clement Camposano • Lonnie Carter • Catherine Ceniza Choy • Denise Cruz • Deirdre de la Cruz • Vince Diaz • Michelle Dizon • Kale Bantigue Fajardo • Theodore S. Gonzalves • Mik Gaspay • Jason Gavilan • Mark Johnson • Kat Larson • Miguel Libarnes • Claudia Liebelt • R. Zamora Linmark • Mirca Madianou • Wawi Navarroza • Jonathan C. Ong • Enrique G. Oracion, Ph.D. • Elizabeth H. Pisares • Eric Estuar Reyes • Dylan Rodriguez • Lordy Rodriguez • Robyn Magalit Rodriguez • Sarita See • Harrod Suarez • Nobue Suzuki • Stephanie Syjuco • Rolando Tolentino • Karen Tongson • Jenifer K. Wofford

August 1, 2013