Guiding Question from the Magnum Foundation's recent "Counter Histories" Open Call

A screenshot from the Magnum Foundation’s website and recent open call. I found it so helpful to consider and reconsider this concentration of questions, which they provided as prompts for applicants. I submitted my Balikbayan project for consideration and development under the programming they’ve organized under the theme of “Counter Histories.”

I was especially interested in applying because the programming, community, and resources built into it could help me find ways to challenge and develop my thinking in regards to the institutional and documentary images of Indigenous artifacts from the Philippine islands, and how those documents create, present, and serve as a continuing archive of anthropological research, of non-scientific looking, of cultural memory, of personal loss. Can documents such as these be transformed and recontextualized as a counter-archive that stresses giving over taking, and serves and signifies ideas and feelings of resistance, relation, and repair?

FWIW, here’s the answer the provided to the current first guiding question:

I believe an archive of the future can look like a gift: let’s take the dry, institutional photo documents that recorded the excavated objects of American colonial conquest in the Philippines, and now carefully wrap them up, protect and obscure them from further looking and study, and finally ship them back—if only imaginatively—in the very boxes that the American Filipino diaspora uses everyday to connect back to family and friends in the homeland.

Excerpt: Jenny Odell on Pilvi Takala's "The Trainee"

Untitled (from the series Griffin Memorial), 2010

“In 2008, employees at an office for the accounting firm Deloitte were troubled by the behavior of a new recruit. In the midst of a bustling work environment, she didn’t seem to be doing anything except sitting at an empty desk and staring into space. Whenever someone would ask what she was doing, she would reply that she was “doing thought work” or “working on [her] thesis.” Then there was the day that she spent riding the elevators up and down repeatedly. When a coworker saw this and asked if she was “thinking again,” she replied: “It helps to see things from a different perspective.” The employees “became uneasy. Urgent inter-office emails were sent.

It turned out that the staff had unwittingly taken part in a performance piece called ‘The Trainee.’ The silent employee was Pilvi Takala, a Finnish artist who is known for videos in which she quietly threatens social norms with simple actions. In a piece called Bag Lady, for instance, she spent days roaming a mall in Berlin while carrying a clear plastic bag full of euro bills. Christy Lange describes the piece in Frieze: “While this obvious display of wealth should have made her the ‘perfect customer,’ she only aroused suspicion from security guards and disdain from shopkeepers. Others urged her to accept a more discreet bag for her money.”

’The Trainee’ epitomized Takala’s method. As observed by a writer at Pumphouse Gallery, which showed her work in 2017, there is nothing inherently unusual about the notion of not working while at work; people commonly look at Facebook on their phones or seek other distractions during work hours. It was the image of utter inactivity that so galled Takala’s colleagues. “Appearing as if you’re doing nothing is seen as a threat to the general working order of the company, creating a sense of the unknown,” they wrote, adding solemnly, “The potential of nothing is everything.”
— Jenny Odell, "How to Do Nothing"

Wanderings: Mystic Seaport Museum, Connecticut

Wanderings: Big Bend National Park

Wanderings: Bastrop State Park

Studio photos of Balikbayan project

A few pictures of the completed works before sending them off to the exhibition!

Balikbayan (Studies for Plinths), 2021

Balikbayan (Studies for Wrapped Gifts), 2021

Site Update: Studies for Balikbayan Box Plinths and Wrapped Gifts

Today I’m opening up my previously private project page (a PPPP of course) for my works involving balikbayan boxes and the imagined extralegal restitution of cultural objects extracted from the Philippine islands by American colonial expeditions. A first iteration of the work is now on view at The Contemporary Austin as part of a group survey, Crit Group Reunion.