Balik (Sa) Bayan
Exhibited as part of Little Manila Queens: Mabuhay! at MoMA PS1, May 16–October 21, 2024.
Balik Sa Bayan is a transnational social practice project presented as part of Little Manila: Mabuhay! at MoMA PS1 (2024). The project began with the intentional dismantling of the Balikbayan Arch — a temporary monument built from cardboard balikbayan (remittance) boxes in the form of a colonial triumphal arch modeled on the Dewey Arch. Rather than preserving the structure, participants unbuilt it box by box, packing each one with goods and sending them to grassroots partners in the Philippines. The act of dismantling was the work: a collective refusal of both the monument's symbolism and the abstraction of care.
The project draws on social practice traditions that position art as a collaborative, community-embedded process oriented toward social relations rather than objects. Grounding these frameworks in Filipino diasporic experience, Balik Sa Bayan examines how care circulates under conditions of U.S. imperialism, labor export, and humanitarian governance — systems that have long displaced public responsibility onto diasporic families and their remittances. By moving through mutual aid, community ritual, and participatory action, the project treats redistribution and relational accountability as artistic form, asking what it looks like to redirect a structure of accumulation into an act of collective obligation.