“bumalik” (Tagalog for “to return”) is a durational performance installation that integrates a bamboo sculpture, movement, and sound. Centering Filipina narratives, this piece excavates the complex experiences and emotions of migration and uprootedness: the disorientation/reorientation within environment and place, the duality that exists between racialized opportunity and oppression, and the internalized effects of hypersexualization and violence in the cis-white-patriarchal world. This interdisciplinary cast weave together intergenerational stories of the perpetual process of “reinhabiting the skin” in hopes to find a sense of “home,” amidst these challenges and traumas. Set within a bamboo sculpture, which in moments becomes a forest, nipa hut, seashell and cage, there is a constant activation of memory between the body, the sexualized, the natural, and the built. The intention of the interdisciplinary nature of ‘bumalik’ is to merge, acknowledge and give voice to the multidimensionality of Filipina diasporic stories and experiences that are otherwise erased, silenced or in the shadows.


collaborators Marie Lloyd Paspe, Ching-I Chang, Paulina Meneses, Sugar Vendil, Treya Lam