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Abstract

Research Background: Can the ideas from the diaspora’s invisible qualities of adaptability as skilled migrants, long-term exiles, visiting foreigners and culture bearers – affect and effect a transformative and circuitous exchange in the ‘here and there’ and sustain an asymmetrical Filipino imaginarium? My art practice unraveled through trans-local lens from trans-cultural experiences in reaching out to Filipino cluster communities in south-east Queensland. The forming ideas, concepts and insights brought about from the studio research, cross-border implementation, overseas exhibitions and in Pause, Forward reconnect the expatriate audience to a postcolonial project that is not binary and dichotomous, where art becomes a social practice.

Research Contribution: Photography forms the reconnections to the mundane through the use of the camera as an image-making device and evolving technologies in printing the image. As a foundational medium printed on vinyl creates multiple points of engagement with the photographic image layered with painted or erased visual elements, crafted materials and impressed with folds, textures on the surfaces. The sensorial interaction with the viewers activates the spectre of comparisons from a haunting moment to remembering specific trans-local experiences as a culture-bearer from the hometown/nation realised in art in situ.

Research Significance: The important role of an exhibiting Filipino visual artist, as a global citizen, a sojourner, a kababayan (thinking of other Filipinos), one who imagines oneself as part of a trans-local and transplanted barangay (village) and to make us re-member why our ancestors after consecutive colonial experiences in the archipelago declared to be a republic. Clearly, the contemporary artist undertakes hyphenated roles, becomes a trans-cultural interlocutor, knowledge brokers or as ordinary vernacular participant, or a promoter of communal solidarity, who manages contentions as an aware subaltern.