Snare for Birds: Rereading the Colonial Archive
Collaborative project with Kiri Dalena and Lizza May David. Presented through three project iterations at The Panublion Museum, Roxas City, Capiz; the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library, San Fernando, La Union; and Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City, 2023–2024.
Snare for Birds: Rereading the Colonial Archive is a collaborative research-based art project that returns to the Philippine-American colonial photographic archive as a site of contestation. The project takes as its primary subject the images of Dean Worcester — ornithologist, Secretary of Interior of the Philippine Islands, and one of the most prolific producers of colonial visual knowledge — whose photographs helped consolidate racialized ideas of Filipino identity, shape U.S. foreign policy, and legitimate imperial governance through the authority of the camera.
Working across drawing, portraiture, film, and installation, Kiri Dalena, Lizza May David, and Jaclyn Reyes approach these photographs not as historical evidence but as instruments: made to manufacture truth, circulated to justify domination, and still active in shaping how Filipinos are seen and how they see themselves. The project asks what it means to look back at this archive from within the communities it sought to define — and what forms of knowledge, dignity, and refusal become possible in that return.
Each artist brings a distinct practice and geographic position to the shared inquiry, developing independent bodies of work through sustained thought partnership across the Philippines, Germany, and the United States. This structure of collaboration became inseparable from the project's argument: working together across distance and diaspora is itself a decolonizing practice, a refusal of the fragmentation empire produces. Snare for Birds understands each exhibition not as a conclusion but as an opening — a continued reckoning with what the colonial archive made visible, what it buried, and what remains to be seen.
The Panublion Museum, Roxas City, Capiz
Alfredo F. Tadiar Library, San Fernando, La Union
Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City, Manila