MILAGROS (IN UNEXPECTED PLACES) is a sound installation work that places ancestral knowledge of survival, metaphor, and the future as means of guiding present-day action, both personal and collective. Installed at Dream Farm Commons’ entryway, emanating through the building’s mail slot, the work delivers sounds of chickens and wind— Filipinx symbols for fortune, fate, and fight— as a daily call for a renewed perseverance, solidarity, and defense of civil liberty and autonomy.

The work calls on various locales of ancestral wisdom by referencing the artist’s family where symbolic domestic rituals hold chickens as arbiters of prosperous fortune; where an urban rooftop chicken farm on a small ancestral home in the outskirts of metro Manila is a self-productive means of living; and where Milagros— or miracles— is the name of the artist’s grandmother who passed down that home. By also referencing the chicken’s cry as a repetitive prompting for action in light, and the rooster as a historical Filipinx symbol for courage in adversity, the work calls on a collective spirit of strength for the community work at hand that includes support for Black lives and defense for the USPS amidst political sabotage. Lastly, the work positions the South/East Asian proverb of bamboo in the wind as a call to resiliency and adaptability amidst polyrhythmic uncertainty.

MILAGROS (IN UNEXPECTED PLACES) was created for “Ancestors, Activists & Comrades: A Community Altar for Black Lives” at Dream Farm Commons in Oakland, CA. Big thank you to curators Tracy Ren and Jess Young.

MILAGROS (IN UNEXPECTED PLACES) (2020), Audio track through mail slot and glass store front, 7 minutes and 35 seconds.