Follow The Water
The world is more water than land—in an archipelago, this truth is a daily lived experience. Water connects us to that which is all around us, and within us.
Photo by Muhammad Fadli, The Banda Journal
On Earth Day ‘22, we opened ‘Follow the Water,’ an outdoor photography exhibition in La Union, and invited viewers to rediscover our beloved Philippine waters, confront the threats they face, and to journey to other coasts and islands across Southeast Asia through photography.
The Philippines is the center of the world’s marine biodiversity, and among the countries most vulnerable to climate disasters. Now, more than ever, it is crucial to recenter coastal communities as the frontline in the fight against the climate crisis.
To follow the waters that flow and gather all around us, beside our houses, alongside our roads, along our coastline, and deep in the ground beneath our feet, is to understand that we’ve never lost our relationship to the lakes, rivers, and seas of this planet; we’ve merely forgotten the connection. Like the clouds and the seas, we will forever belong to the water cycle. But only by rediscovering and renewing our place in this dynamic, interdependent system can we start to reckon with the devastation we are wreaking on the very waterways that give us life.
Follow the water features work by Mandy Barker, Geric Cruz, Muhammad Fadli, Archie Geotina x Bren Lopez x Ikit Agudo, Gab Mejia, Huiying Ore, Hannah Reyes Morales and Nicola Sebastian, Woong Soak Teng; and our Plastic Passages Workshop Participants Arturo Dedace III, Jed Nathan Cruz, Geela Garcia, Racelle Rescordado, Aia Solis, Jazmin Tabuena, Yuri Tan, and Jomar Tingson. It was held in Flotsam and Jetsam Artist Beach Hostel in San Juan, La Union.
Follow the Water Photography Showcase: Shared Waters, Shared Stories
Our relationship with these waters tells a most fundamental story about our community, its place in the greater ecology of these lands, and the future of our island nation.
We pushed on in this journey of rediscovery, going beyond our shores to connect to other coasts, other communities, whose lives are similarly shaped by the water; blessed and cursed by it. To tell the story of our collective waters, we decided to showcase work from international and local photographers exploring resonant themes across the Southeast Asia: the damming of one of the most important rivers in the region; devotees to the famous, degrading Manila Bay; the Indigenous stewards of a burning wetland; the afterimage of colonisation in a remote Indonesian island chain; the solarpunk reimagining of the Maria Clara Filipina archetype; and fisherfolk communities coexisting with marine life at the center of the Coral Triangle. In order to bring the global conversation about art and ecology to one of the very places that urgently need solutions to the humanitarian crisis that is climate change, we presented this photography showcase to our seaside community of San Juan, La Union.
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Headlining the exhibition was the collaborative piece ‘DIP Sea KISS,’ which was made possible by our community, who helped collect the plastic sachets that make up the image. Through the exhibition, we highlighted the importance of participatory photography in telling the stories of those most affected by climate issues.
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Beyond the work we did in Plastic Passages, we took the project further by curating works from and about the waterways of Southeast Asia for the Follow the Water showcase. The images, together, hopefully situate a local community in the context of a global conversation.
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The works featured in the exhibition reached both the provincial community and the visiting local tourists. We hosted it outdoors, having the imagery appear by the ocean. By opening the exhibition on Earth Day, we asked people to participate in the conversation in person, and learn about the diversity of issues around the beloved waters we surf.
Plastic Passages: An Oceanic Exchange
Living in Surf Town, it’s hard to ignore the sight of plastic debris littering our beaches after a heavy rain, caught amongst the roots of our mangrove forests, or else floating in the waves as we surf. The Philippines consumes a staggering 163 million pieces of plastic in a single day, much of it single-use, unrecyclable plastic sachets. Couple that with a national waste management system that is largely theoretical, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Philippines is the worst marine plastic polluter in the world. This is according to a study in 2021, which also discovered that the river contributing the most plastic pollution to the world’s oceans is none other than our very own Pasig River.
All too often, we focus on individual responsibility when it comes to plastic pollution, but in truth the presence of plastic in our environment is a community problem—one that can only be solved if everyone works together. So we at Emerging Islands asked ourselves, how can we respond to the problem of plastic while embodying the spirit of collaboration and community?
We reached out across the ocean to Mandy Barker, a British conservation photographer whose work on marine plastic debris has appeared in the MoMA and Tate Museum. Our idea was for Mandy, together with one of our co-founders, Hannah Reyes Morales, to track the movement of plastic along La Union’s waterways—not just as individual photographers, but in tandem with a workshop of eight student photographers from around the Philippines. By holding space for divergent, even contrasting perspectives and practices, our plastic expedition truly would be a collective inquiry. Little did we know that it would yield an even greater (re)discovery of that which surrounds us, supporting us all this time: the water that sustains life on this Earth.
DIP Sea KISS: a collaboration with LU’s coastal communities
In our conversations, the photographer Mandy Barker told us that she wanted to produce an artwork targeting the problem of plastic sachets. Single-use and unrecyclable, plastic sachets are a strategic exploitation by multinational companies of the short-term purchasing habits of the poorest in the Philippines, and inspired by the traditional tingi system of sari-sari stores. We partnered with local communities in La Union, namely the turtle patrollers of Baroro, Bacnotan, the mangrove stewards of Bauang, the local environmental youth organisation YES!, and DOERS, the beach clean-up volunteers of Dalumpinas, San Fernando. Together, we gathered discarded plastic sachets from roadside canals, beaches, tidal pools, mangrove forests, rivers, and surf spots, swapping stories along the way. We sent these materials (plastic sachets and anecdotes, both!) to Mandy, who has journeyed across the Pacific and visited some of the most remote islands on the planet. We are proud to say that the DIP Sea Kiss is her first foray in the Philippine Islands, which she hopes will trigger more discussion around not just our local waste culture, but the multinational companies that need to be held accountable for the global tide of plastic.
Plastic Passages Photography Workshop: New Ways of Seeing
We designed an intensive, weeklong photography workshop comprised of eight students from diverse backgrounds around the Philippines: photojournalists, a university professor, conceptual photographers, and even a science researcher. The workshop, headed by photographers Mandy Barker and Hannah Reyes Morales, was our way of expanding our conversation with other storytellers so we can go beyond the cliched understanding of an issue like plastic pollution. We wanted to capture a deeper, more holistic picture of the daily life and culture of our coastal communities. Though our students took on different issues relating to our waterways, and approached their stories in diverse ways, they each refracted the singular experience of living on these islands: surrounded and inundated by water, reckoning with a twice-colonised past, and caught in the climate struggle between the Global North and South.
Special thanks to Celso Jucutan of DMMMSU, San Juan municipal environmental officer Riza Abat, Tina Antonio of the San Juan Resort Restaurant and Hotel Association, Miguel Vargas of DOERS, and Jesse M. Cabanban from the fisherfolk association of Baroro, Bacnotan, for coordinating the collection of these plastic sachets, and to Flotsam and Jetsam for hosting our exhibit.
This project was made possible through the generous support of the British Council.