WITH WIND, COME WHAT MAY (2020) is an immersive installation that looks to an embodied Filipinx and South/East Asian proverb of moving with the wind as a means of guiding perseverance, resilience, and strength during difficult and uncertain times. Footage of the artist's apartment curtains shaking, billowing, and moving in and out of the building with the force of wind, is accompanied by text of family advice-telling. Two standing house fans flank the video screens so that the video can only be viewed against the wind— and the video can only be left behind by proverbially walking with the wind. Based on Filipinx magkwento and bahala na, and using an intimate experience of wind immersion to embody metaphors of future circumstance as wind and us as our wind-moved environments, WITH WIND, COME WHAT MAY looks to intergenerational, cultural, and familial wisdom for advice and resolve in determination while also acknowledging that which is out of our hands.
“When I was young,
my Mother once told me,
that when the heavy Wind carries away—
I’d remain.
These days, Her advice sounds a bit different,
A billowy advice swelling up with the knowledge and wisdom
of prevailing generations,
of ancestral spirit,
of typhoons and hurricanes,
of quakes and tremors,
of a quiet, immigrant litanya,
of the rowdy barrio fiesta,
of arduous nights,
of clean hospital scrubs and Navy-issued coveralls,
of Pacific-Atlantic crosswinds,
of strategy and survival,
of a whirling fate,
of pressurized self-determination,
of prize belief sets,
of omnidirectional uncertainty.
From an opposite coast, She tells me,
’Be like the bamboo that sways in the Wind,
Move with It, whatever direction It blows,
Anak ko, bahala na.
Come what may.’
Come what may.”
Special thanks to Pamela Meadows, Brandon Ingold, and the student workers at UNC for helping realize this artwork.
WITH WIND, COME WHAT MAY (2020), Immersive environment of projected video, audio, curtains, and four fans. Documentation by Campus Commons Gallery at University of Northern Colorado, Greeley.