plagued by longing
In 2004, my father survived a heart attack and seizure, undergoing a near-death experience (NDE) during the ten minutes he was clinically dead. This event caused permanent short-term memory loss, subsequently leading to dementia. The work begins with his NDE account, a repeated narrative that grounds him amidst confusion. The story has been a conduit to traverse his memories: growing up in the Philippines, immigrating to America, and his longing to return to our motherland. The lapse in his memories mirrors the blurry precolonial histories in the Philippines, overshadowed by colonial influence.
This body of work follows my father's narrative to drive my investigations of recovering my family’s history, while contextualizing it within the colonial history of the Philippines. Storytelling is used as a making process that pulls from a lived experience. Through retelling, elements shift and change, transforming the narrative into something different: a complicated record that fuses the past and the present via the storyteller. As my father's dementia affects his memories, through recounting his experiences, nuances evolve depending on his current state, tangling the past, present, and future within the narrative.
Rather than simply verbalizing the tale, I engage in a somatic process, locating tensions within my body that have absorbed the story. I then transform materials through collapsing and extending them into forms that echo my body's repository of inherited experiences.
photo documentation by Matt Savitsky
In 2004, my father survived a heart attack and seizure, undergoing a near-death experience (NDE) during the ten minutes he was clinically dead. This event caused permanent short-term memory loss, subsequently leading to dementia. The work begins with his NDE account, a repeated narrative that grounds him amidst confusion. The story has been a conduit to traverse his memories: growing up in the Philippines, immigrating to America, and his longing to return to our motherland. The lapse in his memories mirrors the blurry precolonial histories in the Philippines, overshadowed by colonial influence.
This body of work follows my father's narrative to drive my investigations of recovering my family’s history, while contextualizing it within the colonial history of the Philippines. Storytelling is used as a making process that pulls from a lived experience. Through retelling, elements shift and change, transforming the narrative into something different: a complicated record that fuses the past and the present via the storyteller. As my father's dementia affects his memories, through recounting his experiences, nuances evolve depending on his current state, tangling the past, present, and future within the narrative.
Rather than simply verbalizing the tale, I engage in a somatic process, locating tensions within my body that have absorbed the story. I then transform materials through collapsing and extending them into forms that echo my body's repository of inherited experiences.
photo documentation by Matt Savitsky