UC Irvine

Di nak sagiden: how to eat with your hands and survive a baptism centers the concept of mimicry around Catholic objecthood in order to examine and ruminate the ways in which a visual language through repetition and seriality may sustain agency and resistance under the weight of Western Christianization. In acknowledging how Philippine culture persists to preserve and perpetuate colonial practices and the desire for whiteness, I interrogate the actuality of the ‘post’-colonial state of the Philippines and its diaspora. I then proceed to explore ways in which ritual Catholic objects may be distorted to subvert their sacred purpose, whilst simultaneously resuscitating a precolonial state and imagining a postcolonial one. These ideas and concepts were explored in the work of my Master’s Thesis Exhibition bearing the same title, Di nak sagiden: how to eat with your hands and survive a baptism, which took the form of a sculptural installation at the Contemporary Art Center Gallery, UC Irvine, in April of 2022. Thinking through the writings of Franz Fanon and Homi K. Bhabha, objects are situated at the confliction of Fanon’s colonized intellectual and Bhabha’s mimicry in order to locate the site in which distortion operates in service of a subversive potentiality. They are Bhabha’s the same but not quite, and it is from this un-likeness that colonized copies may realize their menacing potential to disrupt the homogeneity of the colonizing entity within a material framework. This arrangement of ritual objects – all quite, somewhat, in a repeated slippage, an excess of idiosyncrasy – borrow their likeness from Catholic objecthood.