Paradara (Carrier, 2025)
Exhibition Title: Hair Tied Together, Embodied We Speak
Exhibition Date: February 15–April 27, 2025
Location: Calle Wright, Manila, Philippines
Organizer: Gina Osterloh, Calle Wright
Exhibiting Artists: Patricia Perez Eustaquio, Wawi Navarroza, Gina Osterloh, Nurul Huda Rashid, Stephanie Syjuco, Isola Tong, Yee I-Lan
Paradara is a site-specific sculpture and vessel woven from rattan and balete vines gathered directly from the tree that clings to the rear wall of Calle Wright’s backyard. Installed adjacent to this overgrown corner of the site, the work nests into the wall as if in conversation with the tendrils of the balete, which has patiently grown into and around the architecture over time. In this gesture, plants are seen not only as material but as ecological and historical archive: living witnesses to the layered pasts of the house, its former lives, and the neighborhood that surrounds it. The basket becomes a tender proposition for how memory and place are held together by the living.
The title Paradara, drawn from a Waray term for “carrier,” references Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which reclaims the bag, not weapons, as the first tool of humanity. Through this lens, the sculpture becomes a vessel of counter-narrative, embodying the labor of gathering, nurture, and offering. The entwining of balete vine, abaca rope, and other organic fibers, highlights the material intimacy and care embedded in oft unseen female and feminized labor. This work expresses a practice of weaving together material and cultural memory, creating porous forms that hold space for both.
What stories do plants remember? What can the entangled architecture of trees and structure tell us about a place that has endured colonial, domestic, and artistic histories? Nestled within Calle Wright’s garden, Paradara invites these questions to take root. As the basket holds emptiness, it also holds possibilities: of shared worlds, of gathered lives, of silent histories.
