Sea, Land, Air and the Center for Art and Thought

26 Interface Jan Christian Bernabe, Clare Counihan, and Sarita Echavez See Sea, Land, Air and the Center for Art and Thought “Filipinos work everywhere.” With those words, we launched the Center for Art and Thought’s inaugural virtual exhibition Sea, Land, Air: Migration and Labor in summer 2013, and we established the curatorial and intellectual framework that guides all of our projects: a new kind of Philippine-­centrism. As the curator, editor, and executive director of the Center for Art and Thought (CA+T), a web-­based, nonprofit organization based in California, we take up this invitation from Verge to reflect on how and why CA+T takes the Philippines and Filipinos around the world as a point of departure—­rather than a point of arrival—­for bringing into focus and understanding other histories, spaces, and communities. Sea, Land, Air: Migration and Labor comprises artistic and scholarly works from thirty contributors, and our curatorial selection diversely reflects the Philippines’s current role as what sociologist Robyn Magalit Rodriguez calls a “labor brokerage state,” a country that “actively prepares, mobilizes, and regulates its citizens for migrant work abroad.” With Sea, Land, Air, we wanted to capture Filipinos’ and the Philippines’s role in and experiences of global systems of (neo)colonialism, militarism, labor, and migration. This history, we argue implicitly through all our projects, provides a departure point from which to understand contemporary global processes: we look from the Philippines and Filipinos at home and abroad toward the rest of the world. Thus, we do not think solely about Filipinos; sometimes we use Filipino paradigms to understand, for example, the (de)racialization of American “craftivists” and crafting cultures in CA+T’s virtual online exhibition RaceCraft or the intersection between food and colonialism in CA+T’s exhibition FoodWorlds. At the same time, we hope to Interface 27 contribute a curatorially based approach to the study of Filipino mobilities and digital networks, an exciting field of scholarship that can range from communications studies scholar Fernando Paragas’s research on migrant workers’ experience of simultaneity, to historical anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz’s analysis of the relationship between mass media and the cult of the Virgin Mary, to American studies scholar Jan Padios’s writings on the call center industry.1 We decided to open Sea, Land, Air with images of Jenifer Wofford’s seriesofdrawingsMacArthurNursesbecausetheFilipinonursehasbecome an icon of the globalization of care. Wofford’s nurses, alongside artwork, scholarship, poetry, interviews, and journalism from the other contributors , illuminate global processes of economic and psychic transformation that Filipinos—­ and all contemporary subjects—­ face. We posted these works serially, over the course of several weeks. Juxtaposing creative and scholarly works, this carefully sequenced, staggered launch makes the most of our digital platform. By releasing our virtual exhibitions over time, each new work (or two to three works by a single contributor) enjoys users’ focused scrutiny, while we fulfill the demand for constantly new content. More importantly, users can interrogate each work individually while—­ over the course of the launch—­ interpreting and reinterpreting each work in light of previous and subsequent pieces. For example, in Catherine Ceniza Choy’s essay “The New Face of Immigration: Flor de Figure 1. Screenshot of the Center for Art and Thought’s website (“Space for Discovery and Exchange”). Figure 2. Jenifer Wofford, MacArthur Nurses (Descent), 2009. Ink and acrylic on paper. Courtesy of the artist. Interface 29 Manila y San Francisco by Jenifer K. Wofford” engages Wofford’s drawings , and both Wofford’s and Choy’s works are recontextualized by Wawi Navarozza’s photographic series, Perhaps It Was Possibly Because, that blurs the lines between tourism, labor migration, and cynical travel. Sea, Land,Air, along with all of our other virtual exhibitions, we believe, shows how much the world has to learn from the globalized experiences and perspectives of Filipinos. At the same time, we strive to achieve a productive tension between the users’ twinned desires to skim the surface and to dive deeply into content. As the works in Sea, Land, Air capture the complexities of migrations across oceans and landmasses, CA+T itself has become an example of cultural digital mobility that challenges the segregation between “art” and

Art history · Colonialism · Exhibition · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science · Asian Culture and Media Studies · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy