Creative lineage
DEFINITION
The enduring reference points woven together over time, as the threads that we keep returning to, and inform how we show up in the world, how we speak to each other, what we make, and what we shape.
My creative lineage includes architects, journalists, filmmakers, activists, artists, and writers. I aim to showcase their influence on my practice and perspective, drawing hope, inspiration, and agency from their breadth of work and commitment to excellence, creativity, and justice.
I revisited my creative lineage this May 2024 and distilled it down to the reference points that felt like my enduring certitudes. Put another way, these form the threads of my lineage that enable me to stand on solid ground when I interact with the world. To showcase my creative lineage's breadth, I've noted each person's primary title describing their core body of work
Mapping out the reference points
ORIGINS OF THE CREATIVE LINEAGE
I learned about a creative lineage from an interview of the British fashion designer, Grace Wales Bonner with Solange. Grace's work is interested in exploring the idea of lineage as the threads from the past and present that inform and transform how you practice and what you create. Grace asked Solange who the artists were that constituted her creative lineage.
- Personal sketches of Pampanga (and by extension, Tang): For giving me a more intimate and truthful relationship to the memories I've collected over time and across space through the colored pencil marks, shading, and gestures.
- With sketching, I've been able to define what home means for me in this period of in-betweenness, while remaining firmly rooted to the idea that home will always have a geography. (e.g., memories of my grandfather, Tang, my grandmother's pink house, my birthplace's Giant Lantern festival, the gumamela flowers I grew up seeing, scenes of everyday life in the plaza, or the plates of my Titas' favorite breads).
- The writers of El Boom (authors; literary movement) — For gifting me the formative pang of deeeep resonance in high school through their powerful storytelling, which allowed me to connect the threads between the similar histories of Latin America and the Philippines. I still carry pieces of their worldview with me.
- Agnes Varda (filmmaker) — For her compassionate and infectiously curious lens, angled with a duty towards beauty and poetry without fluff. For placing a dignified and vibrant light to the peripheral, under-valued, overlooked, and the mundane. For painting her films as questions, a counter-point to the assertion of a final, singular answer.
- Pinky Webb and Pia Hontiveros (broadcast journalists) — For the blueprints in how to ask incisive questions that bring us closer to the root source. For showing up with excellence with care, rigor with levity, and conviction with warmth.
- Solange (musician) — For her articulation of the "Cranes in the Sky" elegantly through sound, movement, and visuals when I needed to hear, see, and take an exacting look at my own cranes in the sky, squarely in the eye.
- Anita Magsaysay-Ho (painter) — For the colors, textures, and scenes in her multiple vignettes and portraits of the Filipina with a posture of depth, strength, subtlety, and grace, with a refusal to resign towards a singular Filipina woman.
- Lina Bo Bardi (architect) — For embodying an architect with genuine respect to the existing vibrancy of everyday life in the urban fabric — taking inspiration from how people improvised and made the space their own, and simply lived.
How we can honor the roots that have formed who we are while engaging in the active discernment of the kinds practices we want to PRESERVE from the past, INHERIT in the present, and CARRY into future?
In totality, alongside many things in life, the concept of a creative lineage can be traced to a quote by bell hooks from “Earthbound on Solid Ground”:
"We create and sustain environments where can come back to ourselves, where we can return home. Stand on solid ground and be a true witness.”
SPATIAL AND SOCIAL
REQUIRED READING
"Spatial Justice", Edward Soja,
Spatial justice argues that “justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right.”
“Choosing the Margin”, bell hooks
“Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated, and transformed through artistic and literary practice.”
CARE & REPAIR
REQUIRED READING
Definition of Care, Joan C. Tronto
“...includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”
Concept of Repair, Kader Attia
Alternative forms can take place through the act of repairing, rather than merely retrofitting or fixing the object back to its previous state. This shift in understanding and process involves the creation of a totally different object, or reimagining a different reality.
TRANSLATION
REQUIRED READING
Diasporic Intimacy, Svetlana Boym
Boym proposes the notion of diasporic intimacy, which rejects the idea of a singular home and reflects on the reality that the shared longing for one’s homeland does not occur on an illusory, rose-tinted lens; rather it is a non-linear, precarious process that may not always deliver comfort to homesick immigrants.
“…here comes a surprise, a pang of intimate recognition, a hope that sneaks into the back door, punctuating the habitual estrangement of everyday life abroad.”
Homing and Homebuilding, Grace Hage
"Inherent to the project of home-building here and now, is the gathering of 'intimations' of home, 'fragments which are imagined to be traces of an equally imagined homely whole, the imagined past "home" of another time and space."
EVERYDAY LIFE
REQUIRED READING
Social Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre
Space, according to Henri Lefebvre, is no longer just a container determined by the architect, but is shaped by the ordinary citizens that occupy it, along with the structural forces that render these spaces to be built. Lefebvre defined space as a site of both oppression and liberation, diverging away from its definition as a neutral container with a set of boundaries and walls.
Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant
Cruel optimism is described as a relation or attachment in which “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”
Everyday life as an impasse shaped by crisis where people find themselves developing new skills to adjust and adapt.
