Kumusta na kayo?

Kumusta na kayo? features five Filipino artist and collectives, new to Spain, whose practices are situated at the intersection of memory, everyday life, resistance and community. Through photography, video, installation, collective colouring and internet art, the show examines specific chapters and events in the history of the Philippines, inviting critical reflection on the colonial legacy, collective memory and the construction of the contemporary Philippine identity.

The question that provides the title of the exhibition, Kumusta na kayo? (which in Filipino means “how are you now”), opens up a space of dialogue that inverts the historical direction of the colonial narrative. The question doesn't travel from Spain to the Philippines but is formulated from the archipelago, putting visitors in a listening position.

The exhibition itinerary articulates a simultaneously chronological and spatial movement from historical to contemporary and from territorial to intimate.

In La Bandera: Lucban [The Flag: Lucban], Leslie de Chavez proposes the collective reconstruction of a historical map of the Philippines archipelago with a local community marked by decades of emigration. The act of colouring the map becomes an act of symbolic reconstruction of the territory and its narratives, prompting questions about identity, memory, nation and shared history.

The works of Kiri Dalena and Ben Brix address recent political history and colonial violence. Walang Masulingan is a dual-channel video installation that records daily life on the Manila Metro rail system, merging real footage with reconstructed images to blur the boundaries between documentary and drama. Birds of Prey juxtaposes colonial photographs with contemporary images of the country, challenging the persistent traces of the occupation through the text of a protest editorial article. Meanwhile, in Snare for Birds, Kiri Dalena daubs calligraphy ink over photographs from the same colonial archive to conceal mountains, Filipino civilians and indigenous women forced to pose nude.

MM Yu uses photography to construct an archive in constant transformation that addresses the city as a space of tension and continual change. In Either/Or, one image leads to another in an open, unresolved exercise: the images don't fix the meaning but displace it with the passage of time.

Harong Harong by Czar Kristoff J.P. investigates how shelters are built and occupied in contexts of inequality. The artist's work connects the improvised shelters in informal settlements with the bahay kubo, the traditional Philippine dwelling, revealing both the continuity in these forms of construction and the social and political conditions that characterise them.

Lastly, Chia Amisola presents KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN, a collective platform of Philippine net art conceived as a never-ending karaoke party. The platform hosts the work of eleven artists and proposes an alternative genealogy of internet art constructed from the developing world: contrary to the narratives that present the internet as a universal, neutral platform, the work asserts that the Global South doesn’t only consume the net but produces, transforms and occupies it.

With the archipelago as setting and metaphor, Kumusta na kayo? doesn't seek to represent the Philippines from the outside, but to open up a space of declaration through which the artists claim the right to tell their own story. The exhibition is therefore conceived as a place of gathering and listening, where the images and the narratives displace the dominant gazes and experiment with other ways of understanding territory, history and identity. This is not an exhibition about the Philippines, but from the Philippines.