topic

Citizenship and belonging

This topic recognizes the complex, paradoxical ways in which the formal status of citizenship—legal inclusion in and recognition by a state apparatus—intersects with the desire for belonging—the feeling of being at home and welcomed by one’s fellow subjects. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn asserts in Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Harvard University Press, 2002), “Citizenship is not just a matter of formal legal status; it is a matter of belonging, including recognition by others in the community” (52).


As Filipinos move around the world in search of work, they must negotiate competing, often contradictory demands. While the Philippine state facilitates work emigration, it simultaneously demands that diasporic Filipinos demonstrate their loyalty by exacting salary remittances as a form of patriotic duty and framing them as “national heroes." With a complicated imperial history, Filipinos' citizenship and belonging is always up for grabs and unsettled.

Camouflage IV

Marylene Camacho

2011 Digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

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Marylene Camacho

b. 1981
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Born in 1981 in the Philippines and immigrating to the United States at the age of twelve, Marylene Camacho is a Los Angeles-based artist who explores issues of war in her practice. Primarily considering the perspective and existential experience of the common combat soldier, her work attempts to build upon the artistic canon established on this subject through such mediums as literature, painting, photography, and cinema. Ms. Camacho posits the universality of war, with the belief that it is essentially an abstract condition in contemporary life. Noting the similarities of previous wars and current ones, in both imagery and written history, she believes that war transcends time and space. Ms. Camacho received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2005 from California State University at Long Beach and her Master of Fine Arts in 2011 from the California College of the Arts. She has recently exhibited in Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; and San Francisco, CA.

My work is a result of my own reflections and ruminations on the subject of war. I started to reconsider my thoughts on this issue after viewing photographs taken by a friend who served as a US Army medic in both Iraq and Afghanistan. My goal is to create a moment during which my work generates questions and prompts self-reflection regarding issues of war and its lingering impact on the human experience and psyche. As an abstract condition in contemporary life, war lends itself to be viewed in multiple ways, because everyone looks at this issue differently. I believe that wars, past and present, have a strange rippling effect that continues to be felt for decades, and sometime centuries, to follow.

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  • Born: The Philippines
  • Based: Los Angeles, CA, USA

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Camouflage V

Marylene Camacho

2011 Digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

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Marylene Camacho

b. 1981
image description
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Born in 1981 in the Philippines and immigrating to the United States at the age of twelve, Marylene Camacho is a Los Angeles-based artist who explores issues of war in her practice. Primarily considering the perspective and existential experience of the common combat soldier, her work attempts to build upon the artistic canon established on this subject through such mediums as literature, painting, photography, and cinema. Ms. Camacho posits the universality of war, with the belief that it is essentially an abstract condition in contemporary life. Noting the similarities of previous wars and current ones, in both imagery and written history, she believes that war transcends time and space. Ms. Camacho received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2005 from California State University at Long Beach and her Master of Fine Arts in 2011 from the California College of the Arts. She has recently exhibited in Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; and San Francisco, CA.

My work is a result of my own reflections and ruminations on the subject of war. I started to reconsider my thoughts on this issue after viewing photographs taken by a friend who served as a US Army medic in both Iraq and Afghanistan. My goal is to create a moment during which my work generates questions and prompts self-reflection regarding issues of war and its lingering impact on the human experience and psyche. As an abstract condition in contemporary life, war lends itself to be viewed in multiple ways, because everyone looks at this issue differently. I believe that wars, past and present, have a strange rippling effect that continues to be felt for decades, and sometime centuries, to follow.

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  • Born: The Philippines
  • Based: Los Angeles, CA, USA

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passports

baRbRa

2013 - 2014 Poem. 1 page. Courtesy of the author. Tayo Literary Magazine 4

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baRbRa

b. 1983

baRbRa is a writer, transnational feminist, and LA native who is an alumna of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People and VONA/Voices Workshop. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in Mass Communications and minors in Public Policy and Creative Writing. She earned her Masters in Media Psychology from Fielding Graduate University. Having previously worked at the Japanese American National Museum and with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, she currently works at the University of California, Los Angeles Asian American Studies Center. She is the National Communications Director of the grassroots women’s organization AF3IRM and serves as the curator of AF3IRM's The Truth We Carry: The Insurgent Narratives Project. She is interested in writing and other creative arts as a tool for healing from trauma and for fighting against personal, political oppression.

I write because I choose not to forget.

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Shiny Black Stars

Senalka McDonald

2012 Photograph. 35 in. x 7 in. Courtesy of the artist.

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Senalka McDonald

b. 1983

A visual artist of Panamanian descent, Senalka McDonald received her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2012, along with a B.F.A. and a B.A. in cultural geography from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. McDonald is the recipient of various awards, including Graduate Merit and Diversity Fellowships, the Eliza Prize Grant, and the Murphy Cadogan Fellowship. She has participated in residencies including The Core Program (Houston) 2012-2014, the Austin Project (Austin) in 2009 and 2008, as well as ROOTED (Austin) in 2007. Recent exhibitions include Young Latina Artist 19: Y, Qué? (Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin), in my hair: a group show (Medialia Gallery, New York), Selfless (Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art, San Francisco), John Baldessari: Class Assignments (Optional) (Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco), and Queer State(s) (Visual Arts Center - UT Austin, Austin). McDonald is currently based in San Francisco, California.

Senalka McDonald is a self-identified geographer-slash-artist investigating themes of social   transgression, identity play, and imagined spaces. Using performative gestures and utterances, she examines the perceived role of an-other, focusing on the very real trauma of being taught one’s “place.” That “place,” embodied physically, lives internally, practically in our subconscious, at the edge of social breakdown.
 
Simultaneously comic and tragic, the work engages two spheres of reality: the outer, where you look at her, and the inner, where she looks at herself. In this liminal space, fantasies, half-truths, and lies are one and the same, exposing a game of identity play that is filled with unsure substitutions and willing stagnation.  The work divulges the resulting transgressive games, ultimately, moving us closer to the source of implied truth with the final mark of the happening in any of the following: video, photography, textiles, drawing, and/or live performance.  

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  • Born: Texas, USA
  • Based: San Francisco, CA, USA

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Shiny Black Stars (detail)

Senalka McDonald

2012 Photograph. 35 in. x 7 in. Courtesy of the artist.

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Senalka McDonald

b. 1983

A visual artist of Panamanian descent, Senalka McDonald received her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2012, along with a B.F.A. and a B.A. in cultural geography from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. McDonald is the recipient of various awards, including Graduate Merit and Diversity Fellowships, the Eliza Prize Grant, and the Murphy Cadogan Fellowship. She has participated in residencies including The Core Program (Houston) 2012-2014, the Austin Project (Austin) in 2009 and 2008, as well as ROOTED (Austin) in 2007. Recent exhibitions include Young Latina Artist 19: Y, Qué? (Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin), in my hair: a group show (Medialia Gallery, New York), Selfless (Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art, San Francisco), John Baldessari: Class Assignments (Optional) (Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco), and Queer State(s) (Visual Arts Center - UT Austin, Austin). McDonald is currently based in San Francisco, California.

Senalka McDonald is a self-identified geographer-slash-artist investigating themes of social   transgression, identity play, and imagined spaces. Using performative gestures and utterances, she examines the perceived role of an-other, focusing on the very real trauma of being taught one’s “place.” That “place,” embodied physically, lives internally, practically in our subconscious, at the edge of social breakdown.
 
Simultaneously comic and tragic, the work engages two spheres of reality: the outer, where you look at her, and the inner, where she looks at herself. In this liminal space, fantasies, half-truths, and lies are one and the same, exposing a game of identity play that is filled with unsure substitutions and willing stagnation.  The work divulges the resulting transgressive games, ultimately, moving us closer to the source of implied truth with the final mark of the happening in any of the following: video, photography, textiles, drawing, and/or live performance.  

location

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  • Born: Texas, USA
  • Based: San Francisco, CA, USA

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This Is Not Me

Lin + Lam

2005 Mixed media installation: 1,000 found photo fragments and archival plastic sleeves Variable dimensions. Courtesy of Lin + Lam (Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam).

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Lin + Lam

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Since 2001, Lin + Lam (Lana Lin and Lan Thao Lam) have produced multi-disciplinary research-based projects that address subjects such as immigration, sites of residual trauma, propaganda, democratization, militarism, national identity, and historical memory. Inspired by a particular site, historical incident, or political issue, their research takes the form of interviews, archival materials, site visits, and found objects. Their collaboration brings into conversation their divergent individual strengths. Lam's architectural training informs her work with materials, scale, and space, and Lin's experimental film background guides her attention to the formal capacities of moving image media. Emerging from the interrelation between current events and historical residues, their work offers a phenomenological context for understanding how the past impinges upon the present, and how the present shapes the ways we contend with the past. Their work takes place across a range of speeds, often requesting that viewers spend time with it and challenging them to be alert to things that might bypass them, from quotidian detritus to political regime change. Their recent collaborations have engaged social spaces where they put into question the politics of identity and cultural translation. These projects strive to speak alongside identities that travel across or between recognized categories. Lin + Lam approach their art practice as a means of negotiating difference, the difference in racial, gender, economic, and social status between themselves and a particular community and the differences inherent within the community itself. Involving themselves in an interrogative relation with their objects and areas of inquiry, they hope to foster productive interchanges between diverse and unlikely interlocutors. This may mean bringing together anachronistic sources, enacting counter-archival practices, or combining the personal with the political. The environments the artists construct or the events that they stage, whether physical or psychic, invite viewers and participants to contemplate the imbrication of history, power, desire, and memory.

This Is Not Me.

2005, mixed media installation; 1,000 found photo fragments and archival plastic sleeves

For several years, Lin + Lam have collected hundreds of abandoned identity card photo remainders from a police station in Taipei, Taiwan. Together these photographs represent to them a collectivity of ‘non-identities’: the people amongst us who are caught between visibility and invisibility. At once sad and comic, the faceless testify to the violence that severs individual selves into anonymous categories, such as “migrant,” “undocumented,” “alien,” “refugee,” “stateless.”

According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the term “stateless person” refers to one who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law. The Webopedia Computer Dictionary defines “stateless” as “having no information about what occurred previously.” A stateless server, such as the World Wide Web, treats each request as an independent transaction without requiring any context or memory.

This is Not Me points to negation—as it exists in ourselves and at the hands of the bureaucratic state apparatus. Such negation arises at the very moment of a double recognition—self-recognition and recognition of the erasure of other bodies in the socio-political landscape.

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  • Born: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
  • Based: New York, NY, USA

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This Is Not Me (detail)

Lin + Lam

2005 Mixed media installation: 1,000 found photo fragments and archival plastic sleeves. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of Lin + Lam (Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam).

contributor

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Lin + Lam

image description
  • See All Works
  • visit website

Since 2001, Lin + Lam (Lana Lin and Lan Thao Lam) have produced multi-disciplinary research-based projects that address subjects such as immigration, sites of residual trauma, propaganda, democratization, militarism, national identity, and historical memory. Inspired by a particular site, historical incident, or political issue, their research takes the form of interviews, archival materials, site visits, and found objects. Their collaboration brings into conversation their divergent individual strengths. Lam's architectural training informs her work with materials, scale, and space, and Lin's experimental film background guides her attention to the formal capacities of moving image media. Emerging from the interrelation between current events and historical residues, their work offers a phenomenological context for understanding how the past impinges upon the present, and how the present shapes the ways we contend with the past. Their work takes place across a range of speeds, often requesting that viewers spend time with it and challenging them to be alert to things that might bypass them, from quotidian detritus to political regime change. Their recent collaborations have engaged social spaces where they put into question the politics of identity and cultural translation. These projects strive to speak alongside identities that travel across or between recognized categories. Lin + Lam approach their art practice as a means of negotiating difference, the difference in racial, gender, economic, and social status between themselves and a particular community and the differences inherent within the community itself. Involving themselves in an interrogative relation with their objects and areas of inquiry, they hope to foster productive interchanges between diverse and unlikely interlocutors. This may mean bringing together anachronistic sources, enacting counter-archival practices, or combining the personal with the political. The environments the artists construct or the events that they stage, whether physical or psychic, invite viewers and participants to contemplate the imbrication of history, power, desire, and memory.

This Is Not Me.

2005, mixed media installation; 1,000 found photo fragments and archival plastic sleeves

For several years, Lin + Lam have collected hundreds of abandoned identity card photo remainders from a police station in Taipei, Taiwan. Together these photographs represent to them a collectivity of ‘non-identities’: the people amongst us who are caught between visibility and invisibility. At once sad and comic, the faceless testify to the violence that severs individual selves into anonymous categories, such as “migrant,” “undocumented,” “alien,” “refugee,” “stateless.”

According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the term “stateless person” refers to one who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law. The Webopedia Computer Dictionary defines “stateless” as “having no information about what occurred previously.” A stateless server, such as the World Wide Web, treats each request as an independent transaction without requiring any context or memory.

This is Not Me points to negation—as it exists in ourselves and at the hands of the bureaucratic state apparatus. Such negation arises at the very moment of a double recognition—self-recognition and recognition of the erasure of other bodies in the socio-political landscape.

location

X
  • Born: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
  • Based: New York, NY, USA

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This Is Not Me (detail)

Lin + Lam

2005 Mixed media installation: 1,000 found photo fragments and archival plastic sleeves. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of Lin + Lam (Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam).

contributor

X

Lin + Lam

image description
  • See All Works
  • visit website

Since 2001, Lin + Lam (Lana Lin and Lan Thao Lam) have produced multi-disciplinary research-based projects that address subjects such as immigration, sites of residual trauma, propaganda, democratization, militarism, national identity, and historical memory. Inspired by a particular site, historical incident, or political issue, their research takes the form of interviews, archival materials, site visits, and found objects. Their collaboration brings into conversation their divergent individual strengths. Lam's architectural training informs her work with materials, scale, and space, and Lin's experimental film background guides her attention to the formal capacities of moving image media. Emerging from the interrelation between current events and historical residues, their work offers a phenomenological context for understanding how the past impinges upon the present, and how the present shapes the ways we contend with the past. Their work takes place across a range of speeds, often requesting that viewers spend time with it and challenging them to be alert to things that might bypass them, from quotidian detritus to political regime change. Their recent collaborations have engaged social spaces where they put into question the politics of identity and cultural translation. These projects strive to speak alongside identities that travel across or between recognized categories. Lin + Lam approach their art practice as a means of negotiating difference, the difference in racial, gender, economic, and social status between themselves and a particular community and the differences inherent within the community itself. Involving themselves in an interrogative relation with their objects and areas of inquiry, they hope to foster productive interchanges between diverse and unlikely interlocutors. This may mean bringing together anachronistic sources, enacting counter-archival practices, or combining the personal with the political. The environments the artists construct or the events that they stage, whether physical or psychic, invite viewers and participants to contemplate the imbrication of history, power, desire, and memory.

This Is Not Me.

2005, mixed media installation; 1,000 found photo fragments and archival plastic sleeves

For several years, Lin + Lam have collected hundreds of abandoned identity card photo remainders from a police station in Taipei, Taiwan. Together these photographs represent to them a collectivity of ‘non-identities’: the people amongst us who are caught between visibility and invisibility. At once sad and comic, the faceless testify to the violence that severs individual selves into anonymous categories, such as “migrant,” “undocumented,” “alien,” “refugee,” “stateless.”

According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the term “stateless person” refers to one who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law. The Webopedia Computer Dictionary defines “stateless” as “having no information about what occurred previously.” A stateless server, such as the World Wide Web, treats each request as an independent transaction without requiring any context or memory.

This is Not Me points to negation—as it exists in ourselves and at the hands of the bureaucratic state apparatus. Such negation arises at the very moment of a double recognition—self-recognition and recognition of the erasure of other bodies in the socio-political landscape.

location

X
  • Born: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
  • Based: New York, NY, USA

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Open for Business

Mik Gaspay

2012 Print. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

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Mik Gaspay

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Mik Gaspay is an interdisciplinary artist who primarily works with found objects, painting and sculpture. His practice investigates translated meanings of commonplace products and structures: drawing from the tension between functionality, purpose and language he conjures up expressions fused from readymade signification, history and uncertainty. His work queries for meanings embedded in the materials within objects we consume and encompass our lives with.

Mik Gaspay was born in Quezon City, Philippines and migrated to Palo Alto, California at the age of 9. He received a B.F.A. in Illustration/Design from the California College of Arts and Crafts and later attended the California College of the Arts for his M.F.A. He currently lives and works in San Francisco, California.

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  • Born: Quezon City, Philippines
  • Based: San Francisco, CA, USA

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Immigrant Lives and the Politics of Olfaction in the Global City

Martin F. Manalansan IV

2006 Criticism. 11 pages. Courtesy of Bloomsbury Academic Press.

The Smell Culture Reader (ed. Jim Drobnick), p.41-52.

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Martin F. Manalansan IV

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Born and raised in the Philippines, Manalansan studied philosophy and anthropology at the University of the Philippines and did graduate studies in sociocultural anthropology at Syracuse University and the University of Rochester, both in New York State. He is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, and he lives in the windy city of Chicago. 

Interested in the intersection of media, popular culture, everyday life, emotions, and forms of bodily experiences, he enjoys the freedom of tenure by indulging in broad undisciplined pedagogical pursuits and research trajectories.  From food to queer issues, urban space to movies, his shifting archives reflect his non-allegiance to disciplinary concerns, although he maintains a deep seated and long-standing admiration for and dedication to the ethnographic method.

He is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2003; Ateneo University Press 2006) and editor or co-editor of four anthologies, most recently Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (New York University Press, 2013), as well as several journal special issues. His forthcoming book entitled Queer Dwellings examines the affective landscapes, ethical lives, and embodied experiences of undocumented queer immigrants living under precarious conditions. The enduring issues that animate and fuel his intellectual pursuits include social justice, embodiment, quotidian life, ordinary meanings, modes of desire and habitation.

While based in the Midwest, Manalansan maintains emotional and intellectual ties to two other cities: New York and Manila. One day, he hopes to find himself in a position to be able to live in both cities at different times of the year. In the meantime, he is content to question, marvel and ironically enjoy the fictions and myths of the American heartland.

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  • Born: The Philippines
  • Based: Chicago, IL, USA

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