A Hallucinations of a Dumaguete Landing & House of Memory
Looped two-monitor video installation
Excerpt: https://vimeo.com/569430380

Hallucinations of a Dumaguete Landing (after Paul Pfeiffer) is a looped video based on the image of a postcard of Thomasite missionaries landing on the shore of Dumaguete who later were part of the founding of Silliman University in 1901. I found the postcard, among the pile of archived documents about the Endhouse Art Center that once was part of Silliman University in the 90s.

The second video that dialogues with the first, entitled House of Memory, is based on a painting of the Endhouse Art Center, which was once the residence of Albert Faurot, an art collector and former professor at Silliman.I play with the theme of the persistence of memory through repetition but such repetition don’t necessarily establish presence.  Documents like the images in the two videos, can also function as a questioning of existence in a more instructive sense. No one speaks of the Endhouse gallery anymore as if it hasn’t existed in the history of artists in Dumaguete and Silliman University. In the same way, the history of the missionaries landing in Dumaguete, as documented in the postcard, is no longer spoken of in terms of problematizing the colonial history of the place. These two instances in the history of Dumaguete, particularly in Silliman University, seem to be disparate events, but they are interconnected  as evidences of the short-sightedness of remembrances.I treat the videos as my own personal reckoning of my formation as an artist–both a product of colonial American education, and of the group of dreamers that once gathered throughout the two-year existence of the Endhouse gallery in Silliman University.
Exhibited at the Place of the Region as Contemporary, UP Vargas Museum, 2018.