Invited to perform in a Saturday Session for the arts space Root Divsision, in the middle of Cian Dayrit's Liberties Were Taken exhibition, I noticed that the only free surface in the space was the ceiling above.

Cian's work is filled with detailed and rich counter-cartographies: tapestries, neon, and paintings filled with handmade qualities, acronyms, and traces of the Filipino experience. He had one video piece on display that made use of layering and mirroring, and I wanted to directly be in conversation with it (and the whole exhibition) – so spun together this performance out of data in a week I've been extracting for a few months...

I created a generative performance that mixed typhoon and climate imagery, data, and overlays along with scraped videos of streets and towns in the aftermath of natural disasters. With my collaborator Kaloyan Kolev, we created a generative performance that took a look at one of the only surfaces missing from the space – the air, wind, and sky: how our understandings of climate are also handed to us by former colonizers, the fallibility of technology's attempts to take control of atmosphere (often instead surrending to it), and the dance of our bodies amidst ecological crisis.

Two projections were moved around the ceiling: one with the climate data, and one projecting text and statements using the anthropomorphized names of typhoons in the country.

Event description
PAGASA, meaning “hope” in Filipino, is a simulated atmosphere of a country’s climate in collapse. This generative desktop performance—part broadcast, part speculative storm—bleeds data and disaster. Titled after the Philippines’ national weather bureau responsible for climate response, the work interrogates institutional forecasting, failed systems of prediction, and the national culture of “resilience.” It delves into the consequences of constant collapse and the ongoing reassembly of our bodies in the face of environmental crisis.