Filipino identity is unsettling and confusing because we’ve been influenced and infiltrated by so many countries. Through this project, my aim was to find out more about who we were before we were taught that our ways of living and being were primitive and inferior and how is learning about the pre- and post- colonial Philippines a personal act of decolonization within myself?

The book is a balance of the historic and mystic through the use of language, documents, maps, data, and folklore. Acting as the narrator and interwoven between each chapter, is the Tagalog ancient account of the creation of the world. The typography mimics the cadence in how it would be spoken.

It was intentional for there to be no white pages because so much of our history has been written upon them. This project aims to retell and relearn a history that has been kept from us. Images bleed off the edges, suggesting that there exists a world beyond the limitations of the page.

In the exhibition for the book, a two-panel installation shows scenes of in and out of the city, examining the duality between being both the observer and the observed and where those lines become blurred.