PAGASA
( Hope )

Growing up with 'hope' as the Philippine national weather bureau, PAGASA is an unpacking of the names & lives we breathe into the tools that instrumentalize the world around us, and our human efforts at patternizing it to avoid disaster. Part alternate mythology, ambient performance, weather report — PAGASA is a sampling of the many conflicting narratives, datas, senses, and histories we use to construct our understanding of the heavens.

In three acts — PAGASA, Diwata-1 (the first Filipino-made microsatellite), Visayan creation stories, the anthropomorphized storms I grew up with, animist belief, and new technological myths — are relived, simulated, soothed, and narrativized in a new oral history. Diwata-1 is named after environmental spirits that once formed, serenaded, and guarded the natural world — now, she has become an all-sensing figure blessed for her all-seeing objectivity — but she sees only through compression, reduction, flattening.

Those who toil the land closest know the smell of the air before the typhoon. The divine Diwata-1 has lost her ability to see all the immeasurable intuition of humanity; she oft fails to pre-empt disaster, she lags in her work at recovery. Our methods of sensing & systematizing that are now valued are rewritten by bodies whose notions of progress are often adjacent to colonial, conquering ideals.

Sonically, PAGASA constructs an ambience around the sensibilities of the manmade divine. Scraped visuals & data from the internet are reconstructed to create a "fourth world" vision of the third world's attempts at heavenliness. It mixes many imaginaries on the sounds of space, heavens, and the tropics.

PAGASA is in lineage of my body of work around tropical technologies, where I unravel our understandings of colonial technologies and how tropical + third world bodies temper and reclaim their usage. In the case of the satellite, who herself returns to the atmosphere, I'd like to imagine that Diwata-1 takes form once again.

I would like to see myself in the image of the whole earth — I would like to know the politics and spirit of its capture.

PAGASA is open to be presented in more venues and forms. Please reach out if interested: [email protected]