Bahay na Rosas
An entirely iFrame-generated short (with no videos), detailing the politicization of cuteness, cultural power, and the erasure of comfort women — named after the World War II home.
2024
Short movie composed of Javascript + external links
The erasure of comfort women, Japan's soft power, and cute violence are traced in this iFrame film. Composed of found images of aestheticized cute, anime, and pastel aesthetics, the small world around the Bahay na Pula of San Ildefonso, Bulacan forms in fragments and frames, veiled in pastel-pink sweetness, sugar, and softness. The language of atrocities, the bodies of casualties are disemboweled, tactically used to displace and dispel a truth. These suggestions of the cruelty during World War II, when hundreds of Filipino women were forced into sexual slavery.
To shape an immaterial, temporal film as comfort women statues are taken down and as reparations are denied begs questions about our relationships with digital cultures and its resulting artifacts that all turn a blind eye—or at worst, aestheticize—terror.
Watch the video in its situated and ideal state (with external links to other content) on the Kakakompyuter Mo Yan website: play.kakakompyutermoyan.com/bahaynarosas/.