ARK (2021)
Exhibition: Cast But One Shadow: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities
Curators: Carlos Quijon Jr. & Kathleen Ditzig
Venue: UP Vargas Museum, Manila, Philippines
Dates: September 24, 2021 – January 15, 2022
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ARK is an installation that examines ecofascism or the intersections of ecology, authoritarianism, and the politics of displacement through a trans* feminist lens. Inspired by the 1972 blaxploitation film The Twilight People, the work draws from its depiction of woman-animal hybrids as a metaphor for the control of both nonhuman life and marginalized bodies under exploitative regimes. The installation critiques the violent imposition of state power and desires over ecosystems and communities, using the figure of the mutant as a site of resistance against colonial and patriarchal structures.
Presented in Cast But One Shadow: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities at the UP Vargas Museum, ARK consists of a steel cage containing a lightbox self-portrait on all fours, clad in a nylon deer costume within a forested setting. The work references the Marcos regime’s 1976 project of translocating wild animals from Kenya to Calauit Safari Park, which led to the displacement of 254 Indigenous Tagbanua families in Palawan. The caged figure evokes both captivity and defiance, mirroring the violent entanglement of human and nonhuman lives in a landscape shaped by colonial imaginaries and dictatorial forces.
Positioned within the broader discourse of Afro-Southeast Asian solidarities explored in the exhibition, ARK reflects on the historical and contemporary violences enacted on bodies—both animal and human, through biopolitical management. The installation, a carceral architecture on the lawn in front of the institution which houses the lightbox, reinterprets the trope of imprisonment in Filipino-produced American blaxploitation films such as Women in Cages (1971) and The Twilight People (1972), exposing the ways in which state power constructs spaces of containment and erasure. The act of choosing notions of hybridity confronts these modes of ecofascist environmentalism offering a spectral presence that unsettles the boundaries between captivity, agency, and survival.
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