Abstract:
For years I have been grappling with the question of home, and as others have asked me "Where do you come from?" every time they meet me for the first time. It might be the voice, the accent, the difference in appearance, or because they were curious about one’s self-identification. This line of questioning had all started when I moved from the Philippines to New Zealand. However, as a child, an eight-year-old, the migration experience was a grand adventure to faraway places, just as Bilbo Baggins once says as he goes off to an epic adventure with the dwarfs in The Hobbit. Home is neither “here” nor “there” in the imagination of the migrant child; instead, it becomes memories and idealised places. Growing up surrounded by New Zealand’s multicultural community, perspectives do change. My worldview expanded and split into two, my Filipino and New Zealand selves intermingling and mixing. What could I have been if my parents had decided not to migrate? Was I still a Filipino? Why am I Asian? These are questions for the social scientists, but the research on migration in art and other disciplines have been fundamental to understanding why some of us keep floating in-between these nations, asking questions of ourselves, our cultures and our identities. To express what home is, my migration experience, and the in-betweenness of self, culture and identity, I have had to make-do with the materials found around me. Becoming educated with western ideals is where I have, until recently, drawn inspirations from to make my art, but in the past year, I have been motivated to take inspiration from the Philippine culture that I also remember. My work draws from traditionally built structures in the Philippines, the Bahay Kubo, a house made out of bamboo, as well as mining childhood memories, through drawing, that has kept me afloat as a migrant in New Zealand. An audio track weaves stories into the work which represents my bilingualism, showing the struggle between what to speak at home and to the broader community.