Stephanie Comilang’s Float: Into the Liminality of Overseas Filipino Workers
Still from Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise) (2016) by Stephanie Comilang. Courtesy of Warehouse421
In the corner of my family’s living room, right next to a tall wooden wardrobe, rests a corrugated box. It’s almost as big as a lateral file cabinet and is heavy with used books, notebooks, and other papers accumulated over the years. The bright orange packing tape plastered around its dented exterior contrasts with the room’s mint green wall. I sometimes use this box as a chair while watching T.V. or as a backrest when working so I don’t feel bad about the space it occupies. It’s been more than five months since it arrived from my university in Abu Dhabi, and started taking up space in the house. It carried the things I couldn’t bring with me when I returned home: class prescribed books, stuffed toys, home decor, and souvenir trinkets. I kept most of them – placing them where they should be – and gave a few to close relatives. Until I find a recycling center to dispose of it and its new contents, the box stays.
It’s common for many Filipinos living abroad to send stuff home inside cardboard boxes of varying sizes. It’s so common that the boxes have their own name – after the Tagalog word for a Filipino returning to the Philippines – balikbayan boxes. The box in my living room is one example, but it holds a different meaning because of my privilege as an alumna of a global network university. My family didn’t fret about the courier potentially losing my box nor did they get excited when I finally picked it up. They cared more that I could go home, that I am home.
Overseas Filipino workers – OFWs – send balikbayan boxes because they are perpetually away from home. They spend months carefully filling boxes with foreign branded chocolates and snacks that children would love, clothes that teens and adults would look good in, toiletries that the family would need, and other items that are difficult to find in the Philippines. In some cases – usually when there are celebrations – or when a family member requests for it, the OFW sender would include a special pasalubong – gift – such as a cool pair of sneakers or an expensive bottle of perfume. It can take months for a box to reach its destination, and many things can happen along the way, but for migrant workers, I imagine that seeing their family’s excited faces – through a screen – when they finally open the box makes the hassle worth it. The thank you’s they receive afterward, in an online conversation or a handwritten letter, are perhaps an acknowledgment that their affection has been felt across the miles, and their presence in spirit.
Balikbayan boxes are a tangible symbol of the diasporic Filipino community’s invisible ties with the families they have left back home. More than that, these cardboards represent how much overseas Filipino workers are willing to endure to support their loved ones. I came to these thoughts while reflecting on my interview with Stephanie Comilang regarding her solo exhibition at Warehouse421, titled “Float”. As a fellow Filipino creative who has worked with migrant communities in Abu Dhabi, talking to Comilang felt familiar. But as a daughter whose sick mother once considered working abroad, the conversation and my preparation for it weighed heavy on me.
Curated by independent critic and curator Murtaza Vali, Float aligns with Abu Dhabi gallery Warehouse421’s mission to showcase and nurture creative programs that make possible, among other things, critical discourse. It presents two films, Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (2016) – translating to Come to Me, Paradise – and Diaspora Ad Astra (2020), which document the complex realities of overseas Filipino workers without showing them at work, thus, solely defining OFWs by their labor. Instead, they are seen vlogging, exercising, reading, and singing, in acts of self-care. Through these activities, they preserve their sense of self and their sense of self at home. Comilang’s films emphasize the importance of having spaces for joy and leisure alongside narratives of struggle and resilience in exploring the OFW experience.
Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso is a film installation that focuses on three Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong and their public performances of mass leisure activities on Sundays – their only day off. Viewers follow a drone named Paraiso as it follows the women throughout the film, hovering beneath the skies and collecting digital memories that become permanent data in its cache. These memories are images and video clips that the women themselves take for those back home. Lifting a blue dustpan in place of a selfie stick, Irish strikes a pose inside her room. In another video, she croons a slowed rendition of Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself” as she combs her hair. As the film moves out of the women’s accommodation and spills into the middle of Hong Kong’s financial district, different sounds combine to signify the gathering of kabayan – fellow countrymen. They are all sitting on cardboard sheets laid flat on the ground. Irish and her friend Lyra stop at one group to ask – in Tagalog – how long they have been in Hong Kong. One woman responds to the camera with a smile while her hands untie a thin plastic bag that contains a cooked meal – which is how carinderia or food stall owners package food in the Philippines. In the background, a man proclaims the name of the Lord. Looking at the box in my living room, I cannot help but think that the women’s cardboard sheets could have been balikbayan boxes in their previous life.
Still from from Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise) (2016) by Stephanie Comilang. Courtesy of Warehouse421
Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso isn’t the first film that made me wonder about the life cycle of balikbayan boxes – it’s Baby Ruth Villarama’s Sunday Beauty Queen (2016). Also set in Hong Kong, Villarama’s film follows five Filipino domestic workers and their transformation into beauty queens on Sundays. The women in both films are the same. They send selfies to their families. They gather in the city center on their day off. They recycle cardboard boxes into temporary shelters. They choose to channel feelings of homesickness into something positive, be it yoga or beauty pageants. Sadly, there aren’t many films that do what Comilang and Villarama do. I keep getting the same titles on Google. When I talked to my older sister about Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, she mentioned their use of balikbayan boxes. She knows about them. But a part of me wonders if it’s because she’s been to Hong Kong before.
In my conversation with Comilang, she points out that it’s atypical for migrant workers elsewhere to domesticize the spaces of the most wealthy. “I focused on the community in Hong Kong because the way the city was built is unlike anywhere else that migrant workers exist. There’s not a lot of space in Hong Kong, really. Even people who have money, I feel, have smaller spaces than probably anywhere else in the world. That’s something that always came up in conversations while I was doing research – lack of space – and that makes it even harder for the women to find space for themselves. So the way they do that is really interesting for me, occupying spaces that aren't really supposed to be for them, that they can’t participate in on normal days.”
Float attempts to mirror this power shift by recreating the sensory landscape produced and embodied by the migrant women. Visitors wear shoe covers before stepping into the exhibition space. Where Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso plays the floor is covered in cardboard sheets and tape, creating a rich, musty scent that pulls you into the materiality of the sheets. Viewers step on them the way Irish, Lyra, and all the other women in the film do. For some, the space may evoke memories of unboxing gifts. But for a Filipino migrant worker in Abu Dhabi, it’s a reminder of a family in a faraway home.
The idea behind Comilang’s immersive film experience started in 2018 when her friend, Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, reached out to her about the triennial video and performance series he had curated. The triennale’s nature inspired Comilang to think of ways to incorporate architecture into Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso, and indeed, architecture is a prominent feature of the film. To Comilang, using cardboard boxes is a good way of alluding to Hong Kong’s spatial geography and how the women carve out spaces for themselves within it. “I think once you step in a space like that, there’s a perspective shift… Rather than sitting in a chair in a museum, you become a part of the architecture while you’re watching it. So it is a way to incorporate the audience into a more holistic viewing approach rather than watching it in a movie theater.”
One of the things that struck me in the film is its presentation of perspective. There are layers of it that get filtered through Paraiso’s narration. But Paraiso itself is a distinct character, being a lifeless drone, ventriloquized by the artist and her mother. In a gentle voice that occasionally carries hints of urgency and worry, it speaks of the roots that tie itself and the women together, and the subsequent isolation these women felt after moving away out of need. “The feelings I have are a direct download reaction to the videos the women upload, see?”, it says at the beginning of the film. However, in reality, introspection and sympathy are not inherent to Paraiso. It is a drone, a machine originally developed during World War I for training purposes, and one that is controversial today for its use in military reconnaissance, surveillance, and targeted attacks. The drone does not come from the same place as the women. Dwelling on the complexity of Paraiso’s character, I wonder about technology’s omnipresence not only in the lives of migrant workers but also in mine. There are many articles on the internet about hackers spying on people through phone and laptop cameras. Even then, we still send selfies and videos amongst ourselves, authorizing select applications to access our cameras. Paraiso’s omnipresence seems to represent this tension. Between the fear of being surveilled and the care in looking out for others, technology remains a staple part of overseas Filipino workers and their families’ lives. Artistic explorations on technological connectivity have become integral in representing OFWs’ realities because they show how OFWs engage in national and personal concerns. Knowing these things can help us understand how migrant workers maintain or shape their identities while abroad.
What happens when a migrant worker can neither access the internet nor go anywhere? Comilang’s second film offers a response. Named after an anthology of Filipino sci-fi stories of the same title, Diaspora Ad Astra is a short film about the experiences of Filipino seafarers who could not return home at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Stuck at sea, the film’s unnamed narrator recalls a past where he dreamt of becoming a famous T.V. personality and imagined being the subject of people’s cameras while on the bustling streets of home. But the narrator’s dream is not reality. “I became a seafarer. I am away for 8 to 10 months a year. It’s very lonely.” The vast, tranquil sea in the background cuts through images and video clips of the narrator’s recollections, bringing it and, by extension, the viewers back to the present.
Still from Diaspora Ad Astra (2020) by Stephanie Comilang. Courtesy of Warehouse421
The narrator sees themself in one of the stories from the book they are reading to occupy their time, Diaspora Ad Astra. Briefly, the film shows a photo of the book. The narrator says, “In the story the space travellers can see their home from space but are forbidden to return to it. They just float there.” The narrator may just as well be telling their own story. As with space travellers, they can only look at their home from a distance. The ongoing pandemic renders the end of their seafaring contract null, their homecoming not yet guaranteed. Towards the end of the film, the narrator sings of their lover’s oath and their joy in having someone to love. They sings like they would have pursued their dream of becoming a popular singer of love songs. The film’s ending is sad but fitting. After all, the decision to become a seafarer – or an overseas Filipino worker for that matter – is a sacrifice born out of love.
Stephanie Comilang is a Filipino-Canadian artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. Her reality – and – that of the migrant workers in her films are a reality shared by over 750,000 Filipinos living and working in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Comilang grew up in an immigrant household watching television and falling in love with what films can do. “I was really into Hollywood films, but I was also into art films as a teenager,” she told me. But the person who inspired and continues to inspire her to be the kind of filmmaker she is today is Eric Oteyza de Guia, better known as Kidlat Tahimik. “I was in the basement of my parents’ house and I was rummaging around. I found a copy of Perfumed Nightmare by Kidlat Tahimik, who was a Filipino filmmaker and the godfather of independent cinema in the Philippines. I watched it, and that was a big a-ha moment in my life, where he was able to tell a story about himself and where he came from. But it was also a fictional story. I liked the mixing of these two things in a film. He was also someone I could relate to because he was Filipino, and I hadn’t really seen many Filipino filmmakers who were doing experimental work. He was the first one.” Her experience reminded me of the first time I met a published Filipino writer – I was giddy. I even felt patriotic. I was already of age when it happened, but it was a moment that mattered to me as a budding writer. I imagined it was the same for the child Comilang encountering Kidlat Tahimik’s work for the first time. Today, Comilang creates complex films informed by the experiences of diasporic Filipino communities.
“In the Philippines, one person’s sacrifice can become another’s way of life. ”
Still from from Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise) (2016) by Stephanie Comilang. Courtesy of Warehouse421
Prior to my conversation with Comilang, I wondered about what it meant to her to exhibit her films in the UAE. After all, the UAE is among the preferred destinations of Filipino migrant workers, second only to Saudi Arabia. When asked about this, she said, “I feel like showing in the UAE is something that I had thought about a lot because...there's probably a wide audience for the films there. But, I mean, there are migrant workers everywhere that I've exhibited so far...they exist everywhere.” I agreed. There are OFWs in over 30 countries and territories. OFWs in the UAE might not have to create shelters using cardboard sheets on Sundays, nor do they have to isolate on ships, but they might know someone, perhaps even a family member, who does. For in the Philippines, one person’s sacrifice can become another’s way of life.
I appreciate the exhibition’s title, Float. It is true to what it signifies: migrant workers and their varying realities of floating between identities, between home and not home – floating at sea, and floating in isolation. Despite extreme experiences of hunger or violence, adding to an already thick literature of loss, they continue to stay afloat. Comilang’s films attest to OFWs’ strength and creativity in actively redefining while also navigating urban cities that are not their own. For them to see themselves in films that make space for their expressions of joy and community, expressions that can displace hegemonic images associated with their work – if only for a day – is a gain that should have been long coming.