I Bring Myself (2010)

I explore embodiment in the midst of global migration in this video installation and performance. I represent the practice of pasalubong (welcoming gift given upon returning “home”) as a performative and negotiated act of reconfiguring self and home. I visualize diasporic intimacy by embodying the multiplicity inherent in being a diasporic Filipina – a part of a body politic of transnational, racialized women. Read with a political lens, the work alludes to the movement of women from the Philippines to the global north, which results from unequal economic power relations. 
The Filipina in in this piece is transported in a suitcase and wrapped in newspaper as if she were a fragile object, and is reference to the global objectification of the Filipina. Conscious of how her body is read in Canadian society, I interrogate this problematic by “bringing herself”, or in other words, representing myself as a gendered, racialized subject and actor in my own right.