DIDTO'S AMOA (Woher wir kommen)

VBKÖ Maysedergasse 2 1010 Vienna
June 7 – August 31, 2016

curated by Stephanie Misa and Lawrence Lacambra Ypil

In the parlance of the Filipino diaspora, “balikbayan” describes Filipinos living overseas who return to the Philippines as tourists. It literally means balik (“to return’) and bayan (“town). The term suggests not only a transformed sense of place, the hometown now traversed through the lens of a temporal tourism, but also a radically different sense of identity: one defined by transience and mobility instead of permanence and stability.

In Didto’s Amoa (Woher wir kommen) we ask Filipino artists what it means to think of home: where they were born, where they now live, what it means to think of a place that is both distant and near, both in space and in time. For the artists who continue to live in the Philippines, what is revealed is a country the continually slips through the fingers of definition, perpetually shifting on its own feet. For those who have since lived away, it is a state of constant leave-taking and return, a looking forward while looking back, the home as kind of in-between condition of both the everyday and the past. In all of their works, a question haunts: once we have left, for the faraway, the nearby, is it ever fully possible to return? Must one look back?

Alyx Arumpac, Martha Atienza, Enzo Camacho & Amy Lien, Jean Pierre Cueto, Eisa Jocson, Trinka Lat, and Jake Verzosa

Photos: Julia Gaisbacher