As a diasporic researcher-artist whose roots are entangled in American occupation and Philippine migrant export labour, I strive to be a “menace to empire.” I want to scorch holes in the manipulative narratives imposed onto my community’s psyche that aim to keep us in our place. Some of these narratives are: obligatory gratitude to our “benevolent” oppressors, pride in aligning with the ruling class, and state-sanctioned historical distortion by authoritarian regimes.

I thus immerse myself in creative reckonings with ongoing legacies of US imperialism in the Philippines, especially through the lens of fashion. Drawn to the tensions between garments, the body, the mind, the spaces we inhabit, and the people around us, I witness fashion as an insidious tool of empire; I also reach to fashion as a means of anti-colonial resistance and queer worldbuilding.

My textile art practice materializes slow and steadfast, intertwined with explorations in creative writing and printmaking. As I train in garment mending and Philippine weaving traditions, I seek out encounters between the text and the textile by tending to my writing practice, which is nourished in historical research and ignited by experimental approaches in vulnerability and poetic play.