title: Recalibrating Filipino Identity: How Diasporic Communities Harness Disruptions and Difference to Contribute to Contemporary Filipino Translocal Identities
Creators: name: Garcia, Abraham A
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Philippines
subject: Filipino
subject: south-east Queensland.
subject: community
subject: translocal
subject: transcultural
subject: artists
subject: postcolonial

description: This research argues that the success of the Filipino diaspora in contributing to the culture of their adopted countries while simultaneously adding to an unfolding contemporary cultural identity in the Philippines draws from the fluid, flexible and adaptable approaches to the formation of cultural identity that have been evident throughout the history of the Philippines. The thesis describes how translocal, transcultural approaches to cultural and social formation were essential to successful, cooperative social development within the demanding environmental challenges of this archipelago even before the country’s declaration of independence in 1898. It traces how these approaches have underwritten the success of both Filipino contemporary artists and the Filipino diaspora in communicating the values of a fluid, unfolding and adaptive national identity. As a means of providing evidence for this argument, my visual art practice focuses on a series of engagements undertaken during my doctoral candidature with Filipino-Australian communities in south-east Queensland. These engagements demonstrate how community interaction and cohesion continue to evolve through positive translocal, transcultural experiences in everyday contemporary life. The research also analyses the approaches of selected contemporary Filipino visual artists who have exhibited overseas, to trace how their own particular translocal, transcultural approaches have proved to be successful ways of communicating with both local and international audiences. The exegetical analysis of my own studio research—particularly the series of installations collectively titled Pause, Forward—considers responses from the expatriate audience in south-east Queensland through suggesting ways in which associations with their new home in Australia are intertwined with ongoing cohesive connections centred around the idea of the Philippines as ‘home.’ The studio research has used photographic media to highlight how mundane, quotidian and subtle aspects of everyday experiences can trigger deep responses of cohesiveness across both community and cultural differences. The original photographic images taken as part of the research have been re-translated in crafted processes and materials that are key to my own hometown in Davao, Mindanao, to produce large installations. An important aspect of these installations is their highly transportable nature: like the expatriates that are the subject of the work, and like the travels to and from the Philippines and Australia that were necessary during my candidature, the work was fashioned to fit a transitory lifestyle, and to speak to at least two discrete audiences. Each installation comprises juxtaposed images from ‘here’ (south-east Queensland) and ‘there’ (Davao), to evoke the haunting ‘spectre of comparisons’ first articulated by Jose Rizal in his ground-breaking novel Noli Me Tangere in 1887, when he described how his experiences in Spain overlaid and influenced his experiences in his homeland. Together, all aspects of this research can be seen as parts of a project that attempts to understand and, in the studio component, to harness how Filipino expatriates establish barangay (village) values to forge new communities that continue to draw from ancestral Filipino traditions, thus enabling them to re-interpret their postcolonial experiences in positive ways and, by so doing, to perform the role of creative diasporic participants in their adopted homes, while remaining valuable contributors to a contemporary republic-in-progress.