As I write this, I am sitting in a colorless studio condo that my uncle rents out in Manila, Philippines. I am visiting family here, and my mother is a balikbayan. The condo is part of a slew of buildings intended to look devoid of individuality, and to push overcrowded Manila into a vertical, modern, and metropolitan aesthetic. The rideshare driver tells me that this land where the monumental condo buildings bury the skyline, is all reclaimed land. There are only two seasons here: dry and rainy. I couldn’t tell you which one I prefer. It is rainy season now, and a construction crew fights to erect concrete pillars for a new building’s foundation across the street. They are forcing stability in the slipperiest of seasons. The names of the condo buildings on this strip allude to the ocean, or natural occurrences in the sea’s wake. I sleep parallel to what was once the seashore of Manila Bay, now with expansive malls that barricade us from the water. I have no vision of the sea that has been shoved further away. Nature is a concept, housed in concrete skin, and evoked only by name.  I am reminded that paper has always slipped through my hands.

For most of my art career, I have veered away from creating works that might straddle the line of autobiography. With my ongoing series, Post Masters, autobiography is shaping the geometry of the project but larger archives and entities are feeding it. As the United States Postal Service was transitioning into advanced automation and barcoding assisted by Artificial Intelligence, I followed the palms of my mother and father and accepted a temp job at the post office. With a petite frame a notch over five feet, my mother made her way to the US from the Philippines. She carried my brother when she arrived. And then me. And then mail. Enlisting with the Air Force after high school from a Missouri Bootheel town, my father landed at the largest military base beyond the US: Clark Air Base. Following his final move to Oklahoma for retirement, he processed mail. Through the Post Masters project, I am reflecting on how personal and political entanglements of public secrets, imperialism, colonialism, and love have led me here. Through negotiations of memory and metaphor, I am interested in assimilation, the colonial imprint, and the boundary of what constitutes belonging to a people, to a place, to a nation.

I started my papermaking residency with Dieu Donné in the spring of last year. After some false starts, I decided I would use the residency to think through the history of the Manila envelope. During my stint in social work, we placed printed case studies inside manila envelopes. A list of client names lined the exterior of the envelope. When the client’s case had been processed, their name was striked out with a bulky red sharpie and another client’s name was added beneath it. Reflecting on these bureaucratic processes, the envelopes often held information that was sensitive and confidential, and most importantly granted the illusion of being contained or protected. The manila envelope was never meant to be looked at––it was simply a generic paper-thin skin to house important content for the record, or something for safekeeping, or something for transmission.

Working on Post Masters, I have become aware of how abaca has been used for papermaking for thousands of years, but the recession-like Panic of 1837 led to a shortage of cotton and linen rag, which forced papermakers to be resourceful. Manila rope, made from strong and durable abaca (manila hemp) fiber, was upcycled from its popular maritime usage by beating weathered manila rope into paper. Rumor has it that the paper was not receptive to writing, so it found form as manila envelopes and folders. Later, the abaca industry in the Philippines was seized during the US colonial period and used for military advancements in the Navy and Army for maritime expansion with cordage, wells, cables, currency, maps, and even tea bags. The “manila” in manila envelopes refers to the Manila hemp (abaca) that the paper was made from, as well as the capital of the Philippines. The name, manila envelope, is extracted from the ghosts of global maritime expansion, US colonialism in the Philippines, and a burgeoning paper and print industry.

In these paper-based works, I wanted to create a space for this material legacy of US colonization to be reconfigured and suspended in time and space. Enmeshing manila rope and manila envelopes within semi-translucent sheets of abaca is a way of homing these materials from a deeply extractive and colonial period marked by enduring displacement. I intend for the manila envelopes and manila rope to have the same regard as one would give a portrait of someone, and a space to meditate on the history of materiality, colonial history, and abstraction. Like the condo buildings named and marketed after the seas but devoid of any immediate connection with the sea, the manila envelopes bear the name of Manila but are no longer primarily produced here, nor made of abaca. In line with my larger creative practice centering the underloved, the manila envelope, manila rope, and abaca are underloved material witnesses that bear colonial traces.

The first exhibition of this work took place in a solo show at the St. Louis Art Museum. For me, it was critical to interrogate how the works were sited and in conversation with the history of the museum. The Treaty of Spain in 1898 marked the end of the Spanish-American War and the Philippines became property of the US for a modest $20 million, and Puerto Rico, Guam, and Cuba were ceded to the United States, but not without resistance. The St. Louis Art Museum was built for the St. Louis World’s Fair. In 1904, The St. Louis World’s Fair (Louisiana Purchase Exhibition) devoted the largest area of land in the exhibition to present its latest colonial acquisition: living zoos featuring cultural groups and indigenous peoples (including Aeta and Igorots), resources, cultural products, land, and labor that could be extracted from the Philippines. Many of the forced migrants from the Philippines died following the colonial encounter. I am contending with the aftermath of US colonialism in the Philippines. I am reassessing what constitutes a body or a nation, while the process of forging exclusion and belonging continue to shape us. I am searching for an architecture, that is not only a surrogate or a skin, to hold us.

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