photograph by Nell Campbell, 2021
My work reimagines my ancestral Filipina legacies that were lost, forbidden, or destroyed violently. Implanted into those voids are centuries of falsified and harmful colonial narratives, many that persist today.
Through experimental materiality and ritual-making, I play at questioning who gets to decide what is valuable. In regenerating the past, I mourn in resistance to systemic erasure and manifest matriarchal ancestors who led pre-colonial society with their healing power. By giving shape to the inheritances I choose to reclaim, I begin to unwind centuries of anti-indigenous histories.
Otherwise, I am complicit in the perpetuation of their harm.
-Tina V.