still. here. now.here is an ongoing project that started as a calligraphic series on paper. In the performance, the act of writing became a meditative action with deliberate, ritualistic movements while opening up the possibilities of language. It has since evolved to include performative/wearable textiles that look back on historical Philippine garments projected into the future.
The garments are wearable but they are not about fashion and its system of commodification. Doing research on these garments and remaking them from tracings is like being a cartographer trying to find some degree of clarity and substance. They are related to the calligraphy and drawing in how they move and transform with the body.
While teaching English in Japan, I noticed my students wrote words in their phonetic equivalent to help in their pronounciation. But in the process, visually, the words stretched, becoming blunt rather than sharp, or overlap with words that have different meanings creating a play on words or creating new words all together. It is similar to the local patois of queers in the Phillipines, who manipulate English into their own subversive patois as a shared language of resistance.