Drawn from the artist's familial narratives and personal journey of relearning Tagalog, agsao iti saritam explores the complexities of retaining a 'mother tongue' amidst intergenerational shifts in language. The work centres the native Filipino languages spoken by three generations of her family, examining the complexities of belonging 'in-between' language worlds and the linguistic divides created in culturally and linguistically dispersed contexts.
The artist collaborates with her grandparents, parents, and sibling, who share their childhood memories through written and spoken word in their respective mother tongues: Ybanag, Kapampangan, Ilocano, Tagalog, and English. This installation reflects how language inevitably shifts, fragments, and is sometimes forgotten or erased as we move across time, lands, and oceans - weaving itself into the fabric of this work to re-present a multifaceted cultural identity that belongs to the present as much as it does in the past.
The work incorporates piña cloth, an indigenous Filipino textile made from the leaves of the red Spanish pineapple plant, used to create traditional Filipino formal wear. Each fibre is carefully scraped from the leaf, knotted, and handwoven to create the final fabric-a process that mirrors the delicate, labour-intensive work of preserving and reconnecting with cultural identity through language.
