Screening - Reading - Q&A

with Liryc Dela Cruz

December 7th at 19:00

Il Mio Filippino is the filmmaker and artist’s long-standing research on the Filipino diaspora in Italy, the third largest Asian community in Italy, and the second largest foreign community in Rome. Departing from the typically Western prejudice of associating an ethnic group with a job, as in the case of the Filipino domestic worker in Italy, Dela Cruz restores nuance to the understanding of this community, whose strong presence and paradoxical invisibilization are elaborated on by highlighting the exhaustion experienced by the bodies of Filipino male and female workers. Ultimately, Dela Cruz reflects on how colonial processes of control and racialisation have altered the gaze on these bodies within society… Engaged in the diverse facets of artistic creation, from cinema to performance, Dela Cruz investigates the various spheres of the culture of his home country, from care, indigenous and decolonial practices, the trans-Pacific trade of enslaved people, to the principles of hospitality in the pre- and post-colonial Philippines, highlighting how these aspects still influence the socio-political perception of the Filipino community. - Spazio Griot (Johanne Affricot & Eric Otieno Sumba)

Come join us for an informal meeting with our GreenHaven Artist-in-Residence.

• Food and drink is available.

• Please reserve your seat.

• We are grateful for donations (suggested : 15 €), here or at the event.

Artist’s Profile

Liryc Dela Cruz is an artist and filmmaker from Tupi, South Cotabato in Mindanao, Philippines based in Rome, Italy. His work has been performed and shown at numerous international film festivals and contemporary art venues, including: Locarno Film Festival, Matadero (Madrid), La Neomudéjar (Madrid), Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris), UK New Artist, Artissima (Turin), Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO), Teatro di Roma (Rome), La Biennale di Venezia and Ocean Space (Venice). At a young age, Dela Cruz received the Bamboo Camera Award from the Father of  independent cinema in the Philippines, Kidlat Tahimik. Dela Cruz has collaborated with and been mentored by the independent cinema’s master filmmaker Lav Diaz, alongside figures such as Hadji Balajadia, Françoise Vergès, Simon Njami, Gutierrez Mangansakan, Chantal Akerman, and Anna Daneri. In 2020, he was selected as one of the young emerging filmmakers of Berlinale Talents during the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, Berlinale. Dela Cruz's films are thematically related to his origins, history, biography and interiority, while his performances and research are focused on care, hospitality, indigenous practices, decolonial practices, post-colonial Philippines, and the transpacific trade of enslaved people. In 2021, Dela Cruz debuted his ongoing research project Il Mio Filippino as a performance at Teatro India - Teatro Nazionale in Rome, in collaboration with Filipino domestic and care workers. In 2020 the project received the Artissima - Torino Social Impact Art Award. Dela Cruz also participated in Mattatoio di Roma’s Prender-si cura residency programme in 2022. Dela Cruz was selected as fellow at the TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary) Ocean Fellowship,  where he initiated a project based on indigenous care and hospitality in the Philippines, drawing from the diary of Antonio Pigafetta titled Ocean as a Space of Perpetual Care. In 2023 he was selected as one of the artists in residence by the Academy in Exile at Freie Universität Berlin, and as a participating artist of Santarcangelo Festival for the IN EX(ILE) LAB 2023-2024. Dela Cruz has performed at the 59th Venice Biennale under the Sami Pavilion and aabaakwaad. In 2023, he premiered his new research performance Kay Kami Mga Mananap (Because We Are Beasts) in Udine Far East Film Festival, a reimagination of the artist on the concept of intimacy and eroticism in pre-colonial Philippines. Recently, Dela Cruz inaugurated his first major exhibition alongside with 2 new performances in Mattatotio di Roma about the trajectory of his multi-year research on exhaustion, slavery, care, hospitality and colonial history of the Philippines  ``IL Mio Filippino: For Those Who Care To See" curated by Johanne Affricot and Eric Otieno Sumba (Spazio Griot) and supported by Gucci.

We are grateful to the following organisation for supporting Liryc Dela Cruz’s residency at the GreenHaven Artist Residency program in November-December 2023.

Background of the work:

Since the influx of Filipino workers in the 1970s in Italy, the country has become the place of almost 300,000 Filipinos up to date in the European Union, making Italy as the country with the highest Filipino Diaspora in Europe. Surprisingly, amidst the chance to claim Spanish citizenship in Spain because the Philippines has been its colony for more than 300 years, most of the Filipinos are in Italy due to religious reasons and “clan” influenced migration. 

Through the years of hard work, the Italian society derived a term in the 1980s for domestic workers, specifically for house cleaners in any nationality as “Filippino.” The term is still being used until now by some families, mostly from the middle-upper class who were raised and cared mostly by Filipino women. The reality that this movement has created is another face of Italy. Yet, while society changes, these movements and actions are being left behind and rejected. This is due to the institutionalized devalorization of institutions, especially by the government. The Italian labor laws that are supposed to be protecting and recognizing domestic workers remain weak. Thus, society forgets and neglects the importance of this movement. How is the movement being rejected? While the domestic workers perform dangerous tasks, being exposed to toxic materials and chemicals, maintaining the cleanliness and orderliness of the spaces, they perform when nobody is around, thus the action becomes invisible. Through this neglect, the society forgets the importance of how these movements contribute to ease and carry the domestic responsibilities of the society, while their bodies become exhausted and  remain non-existent, undervalued, and vulnerable.  

In the history of Filipino migration in Italy, at present, only few Filipinos were able to cross to another field of work, they are mostly second-generation Filipino-Italians who are also confused and disconnected to their domestic worker family members. This problem of disconnection with the families and partners of domestic workers occurs, since  the  recognition  of these movements and to be present in the consciousness of the society, through the creation of laws that will protect and prevent this beloved and neglected workforce  from exploitation and slavery is weak. Until then, these bodies will remain covered by the invisible borders that prevent us from seeing how these movements contribute to how society functions.

The multimedia performance centers on reconnecting the exhausted and colonized body to the earth and soil, and claiming processes of taking care of the body and their connection to nature through rituals and knowledge from indigenous Filipinos. It poses the question on whether and how we can decolonize the enslaved and colonized bodies. Is it possible to unlearn the colonial legacies embedded in these gestures of slavery and exhaustion?  

In the pre-colonial Philippines, caring was always associated with how people relate and  live with nature. Caring was a seminal form of co-existing with the seen and unseen elements of  the environment. Through the long years of Spanish colonization, the trans-pacific slave trade, American and Japanese occupations, dictatorship, corruption, capitalism, social reproduction of “care workers” and modern day slavery in the Global South, the gesture of caring has been reappropriated and redefined.

The expression “Il mio Filippino” was coined in the late 1980s by mid-upper class Italians after the influx of Filipinos in Italy in the 1970s.  A sign of ignorance and, perhaps, of ‘casual’ racism, the term “filippino” is still used to refer to a person of any nationality in Italy’s cleaning and care sector. 

The documentation and video of Dela Cruz documents gestures that have been formed through colonization and capitalism. He also traced the history of slavery in the Philippines from Pre-colonial Philippines to the contemporary Philippines.

This project’s aim is not to trigger guilt . Rather, it is an invitation to look closer at these familiar yet unknown bodies, who silently surround us  in our domestic environments but remain invisible and neglected. Quoting Françoise Vergès: “As we try to clean/repair the wounds of the past, we must also clean/repair the wounds that are being inflicted today... As we repair the past we must simultaneously repair the current damage that increases the vulnerability to death of millions of people in the Global South. The past is our present, and it is within this mixed temporality that futurity can be imagined.” - Liryc Dela Cruz

“I imagine dancing with them. I imagine them in raves. I imagine them emancipating themselves in any geographies, in free lands, without borders, without stereotypes, where they can freely desire and imagine their now, the present and the future based on their own way of self-determination and not through how 'others' and 'histories' determined it.”