From Grief to Hope, an Archipelago
A talk and exhibition by Emerging Islands, presented by Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas & Imagination.
In the aftermath of loss, how do we begin to tell our story?
This May, we were invited by Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas & Imagination to present our work at Emerging Islands in Paris. Instead of speaking for our islands, we chose to bring them with us, as best we could. We transformed the Institute with art created by our artist collaborators, and the stories shared with us by our community teachers.
We unfurled tapestries over Reid Hall’s walls: @sayawciansayaw Cian Dayrit’s countermaps of our country’s history of resistance, @alagaatsining’s polyphonous illustrations of the universe contained in a mangrove forest. @b.nice Buenaventura’s delicate reclamation of Dean Worcester’s racist photographs in the form of microscopic dust screenprinted onto jusi hung over @jaosanpedro’s AI alchemy, a reverse excavation of a slice of La Union’s bedrock: absence abstracted into presence. Meanwhile, open laptops invited viewers into the god-making void of @joshudoser’s video work Creation Paradigm, and @derektumala Climate Forensics, an interactive archive on Philippine weather patterns. From the Cordilleras, we were blessed by @kalingaweaving Irene Bawer-Bimuyag’s oceanic transformation of her Kalinga weaving tradition, thanks to an encounter in the Sulu Sea, and by @rockycajigan’s idea of a joke: an heirloom, made of Real Indigenous Hair. We assembled woven fans in orchid drag and dried leaves of beach morning glory, lovingly prepared by Alaga, and we printed @gabmejia’s photographs tracing the vanishing wisdom of our forests, so that we could make an altar to our islands, at the center of which we placed a woven blanket made in Bangar, La Union, on which Manang Ely had embroidered a line from our video collaboration with @benandbenmusic: “Yakapin ang Kulay.”
For one magical Nuit d’Imagination, the creative cacophony of our archipelago sang out in a cold stone hall in Paris. We sat there, took up space, and spoke the truth of the Philippines’s paradoxical history of endless loss amidst untold abundance, and everyone in the room listened. The Pinoys in the crowd asked the most questions, one even asked how we were.
And then the night was over. We changed out of the clothes made by our friends at @toqa.tv, repacked the art entrusted to us in plastic bubble wrap as the Institute staff went about their regular shifts, and eventually made our way back to the warmth of Home.
It took a village to get us there and back—a circus of friends, lovers, artists, environmentalists, organisers, teachers, and creatures to whom we are eternally grateful. And it will take all of us to keep going. This is our calling at Emerging Islands: to say the same thing over and over again, in as many ways imaginable (and as yet unimagined), to anyone who will listen, with whatever breath and energy we have left in us, for as long as our islands persist against the rising seas: we are here, together, and alive.
