radikalchick

Words. The struggle, it seems, is that if you work with words, i.e., earn a living through it, but also need those words for self-care and sanity, and for practicing your citizenship, and for exercising solidarities, that you will have the tendency to tire of it, to be exhausted by the sensing of the world that words allow, and the divides words can create, and its futility, too, when none of the words you know do the work that is urgent for these times of lies and falsity, smoke and mirrors. But then sometimes you do something that works, you find just the right words, and you build exactly what is needed, and you think it is enough. For now.💪🏾❤️🇵🇭 Swipe to see how this evolves from I’m a confident happy writer to OMG-my-deadline-was-yesterday-I-hope-they-don’t-realize-I’ve-missed-it.👩🏽‍💻 https://www.instagram.com/p/CU5G__GhpaJ/?utm_medium=tumblr

This is what it looks like. When you want to do nothing, the invitations to do talks are most difficult to resist. Join us at 2PM! ➡️bit.ly/KritiKa #criticism #kritisismo #criticalwriting https://www.instagram.com/p/CTEMmNeBMXE/?utm_medium=tumblr

Now. Are you dismayed, disgusted, exhausted, angry? No matter where you are on the #DutertePalpak-#DuterteManyak-#DuterteResign-#OustDuterte spectrum, you are on this side of the fence that is demanding and fighting for better, straight to 2022. Collective actions, consistently done, online and offline are key. We start now, yes? Pick yours. — https://bit.ly/AnoNaDuts https://www.instagram.com/p/CNAHN1Nhqtm/?igshid=12phk88x2rxyw

Stop. It is rare (very rare), that the commentary and critique that I do paralyzes me, but I’ve been building timelines of pandemic response and more and more what it’s revealing is that ALL OF THIS has been deliberate. This is not a sloppy, palpak, or botched up response. This was a conscious decision not to respond to the pandemic as a government that cares for its people should, and a deliberate decision to cover that up with massive propaganda in the form of resolutions and orders that do not address the pandemic or control virus spread or assist those in dire need, but instead only pretends to, because ultimately all decisions are passed onto the private sector, the LGUs, the public. Which means that a year since this pandemic hit, government is getting away with blaming everyone but itself for these surges, effectively locking us back down as the positive cases rise, as the number of dead grows, and with no vaccines in sight. This, while the government officials themselves—obviously already vaccinated—are out there campaigning for 2022. I didn’t know of hope running thin until it dawned on me that government is deliberately keeping us in this state of fear and anxiety over the virus, so they can win 2022. Tell me there’s reason to stay hopeful. #Pilipinas #Covid19 #vaccines #PandemicResponse https://www.instagram.com/p/CMsBYymBQZn/?igshid=2c68cn7dmh5l

Root. There’s this thing I’ve been wanting to come out with, but which I’ve worked at keeping low key and quiet, for strategy sure, but also and primarily out of fear. And I listen to and read all these inspiring people talk about just doing things, setting aside your fears, finding courage. But more and more I realize these people might not know what it’s like to be here and now, under a governance that has sown fear everywhere, across business-media-the religious-entertainment-youth-IPs-political left right center-liberal and left, poor middle class wealthy, and they might not know of this kind of disinformation and propaganda as forms of violence in themselves, and so I wait. And root. Hopefully to grow some courage soonest. Because we don’t have much time. #climateoffear #fear #silencing #dictatorships #Duterte https://www.instagram.com/p/CMZllPQBkq1/?igshid=1kroxa9qpg0nq

Care. Been thinking more and more about this as we hit a year under versions of lockdown and quarantine, given how things are so so much worse, and how headspace now has to accommodate so much more given 2022. I tell my squad: I think we’re all a little crazy at this point, and I feel it in many ways that I cannot put into words (yet), as I do think it’s my way of making sense of a year on lockdown, in the country with one of the worst pandemic responses, as I have been brought to the point of wondering if the care work we do in @pagasa.ph has been as much about keeping sane as it has been about extending compassion and kindness on a year when a majority got none. ✊🏽🇵🇭❤️🍋 @everythingsfineph is hosting this Q&A of women questions for #womensmonth2021! Do send any question at all. I promise to answer all of ‘em, no matter how difficult. 🍋❤️🍋❤️🍋❤️ Posted @withregram • @everythingsfineph When we’re a year into a pandemic, and there are absolutely no signs of things getting better, there is no reason to frown upon self-care. But can it be a feminist gesture? ❤️✊🏽🇵🇭🍋 Keep your questions coming! #kawomenan #feminism #feminist #feminismo #loveandlemons #loveandlemonseveryday #ofloveandotherlemons #essays #booksph #books #readindie #readindieph https://www.instagram.com/p/CMW8seRhXjR/?igshid=o7k5xap6uhka

Talk 2022. Because watching things unfold, our disgust and dismay, our anger on social media, none of that is enough. Posted @withregram • @pagasa.ph JOIN US LATER AT 3PM VIA ZOOM! REGISTER NOW 🗳 http://bit.ly/PagasaTalkMar6 https://www.instagram.com/p/CMEMFTsB8el/?igshid=1meo6ifeqxuwa

Frame. Solenn has since taken down the PR photo for her new exhibit and I think that this is how it should be framed: a PR photo. Yes, it doesn’t stand for a whole exhibit. No, that doesn’t make it any less offensive. Yes, when I saw the photo, I shook my head and wondered why-how someone whose works are actually critical and powerful despite (precisely because) coming from her place of privilege, could have thought that photo okay (and then I wondered why there wasn’t another set of eyes or ten that imagined the backlash and that cared enough to tell her). No, I didn’t join in the bandwagon response against it, precisely because I have a sense of her body of work and know that it comes from a pretty solid de-romanticized view of place and people, home and context, poverty and inequality. Yes, when I’m asked about celebrity artists, I say Solenn is one of the best ones here. No, this doesn’t make it any less painful to have seen that PR photo, but this issue has made me wonder if it might be a disservice to her art that it is always unnecessarily framed in her iconography, her public persona, which, while intricately interwoven with her art, is also surprisingly and distinctly different from it, revealing as it does a keen sense of the political, and the artist as politicized beyond her social media content. Yes, these works are hers, from the last exhibit she had, and yes, the first two felt like a diptych of our times, where the most marginalized and silenced are at the mercy of icons and politicos and all that they stand for. Here: I wish for @solenn a frame that actually does justice to her work, because then it would also start conversations that are important to have, especially now, given 2022. #artPH #culturePH #artandpolitics #artandsocialclass #classdifference #celebrityculture #influencerculture https://www.instagram.com/p/CL_qhf8h9Ca/?igshid=1s31s1we5228l

Ask. Because as I said in the @shetalksasia interview, I am the persom who will always ask: what do YOU think? does this make sense? And that’s a good thing, to always ask questions, before moving forward. Am doing this with @everythingsfineph for #WomensMonth2021, probably the most critical time for women given the 2022 elections. 15 months to go. 🇵🇭❤️🍋✊🏽#kawomenan #feminism #womanhood #beingbabae #babae https://www.instagram.com/p/CL5rN6jhHKI/?igshid=mm68ks5bd893

Year. The Japan trip this time last year continues to take up headspace because it was then that I started keeping a journal of sorts on the notion of a pandemic. We had left the Philippines (Vito for Australia, and I for Japan) on the same day, and I was going to Yokohama, which was in the news for that ship that had been locked down, no one allowed to leave, because of Covid cases no one knew how to handle. I’d like to say that made me anxious, but it didn’t. Instead I was excited about travel (as I always am), and especially about traveling alone, and even more so about why I was going (it was to watch plays and performances for #TPAM). I spent much time with @sharmillag, @amithaamranand, and @bilqis_the_birder and made new friends, ate a lot, walked even more, had plenty drinks. Yokohama made it easy to imagine there was no virus, even as I tried very hard to keep from touching my face while outside, and there were free sanitizers everywhere, and we kept wondering (joking about) if the ships we were seeing were the ones with Covid (none of them were). There was so much laughter and banter and critique and conversation then, and really really good performances, it’s probably the best time I’ve had as critic. Which seems like the perfect prologue to being locked down practically the moment I got home, and for the past 10 months. One of my notes from then: “This feels like a bubble that no one’s popping.” I guess I knew even then that bubbles were a matter of privilege. #travel #Japan #Yokohama #pandemic https://www.instagram.com/p/CLCYB6RhD-J/?igshid=mj4f1xps3gw1

One year of LDR-ing with this one. We’ve done well, wethinks. #vitoandinasittinginatree #plustwenty ❤️👩🏽👦🏽🐶✊🏽 https://www.instagram.com/p/CLBEXYBBS5B/?igshid=14cl0th8u99do

Beyond Seeing. Maybe when we think of travel and destinations, we start thinking now, more and more, about the politics and governance that keep nations afloat, given violence and oppression, poverty and need, in places we photograph as backdrops for our IG feeds. Maybe we start telling stories about these places, its peoples, its crises, so we also understand better how resistance and dissent, the fight for freedom and democracy, persist. Some things—the calmness of the provincial, the bowed head in greeting, the easy laughter, the colors of culture, the commitment to faith, the belief in icons—some things we understand, beyond language, given history, given what ties us together across the SEA. And we tell those stories. #DemocraSEA #demokrASIA #myanmar #myanmar🇲🇲 #democracy #AsiaUnderThreat 📷 from a 2017 trip to Bagan, an ancient city in the Mandalay Region of Myanmar. https://www.instagram.com/p/CK1fREZBelR/?igshid=3luxsu7xfcu6

Home/Bodies. Ten months into this pandemic, and under this failed Duterte leadership, and our awareness of privilege has kept us from discussing what it’s been like for us: we tweet it, post about it for our echo chambers, but we have yet to write about it to flesh things out, to discuss the mental and physical difficulties, because how can we do that when so many others have it much much worse? But maybe we pick our battles by knowing what to speak of, from which perspective, where it is kind to self, but not insensitive to the majority. Where we take responsibility not just for ourselves and what we feel we have a right to speak about and do, but just as important: what it is we’re selling, what we are putting out there for the world to consume. Maybe we stop and thing a hundred times, before we get out there and party, and then another hundred times before we post about it. Because the truth is, for every body that might have the cash for tests, hospitalization, and vaccines, there are thousands of bodies that have been left to fend for themselves. Thousands are already dead. This is not about disallowing you your merriment, as it is about asking you: is it worth the risk, is it the message you want to send? How does it look to the world beyond your fans and echo chambers? What is it that you’re leaving for others to see about you. Because on social media, this is all performance. Some earn from it more than others, some need it to survive, but a small group of people can actually afford to shift their gaze elsewhere, to reimagine performance beyond privilege. Because the present demands it, nation depends on it. 🖼 by Chie Koda. From last year’s Yokohaman trip for The Performance Art Meeting. This was at a gallery, bookstore, performance space at the train station. Feb 2020. https://www.instagram.com/p/CKtJcCPBuBS/?igshid=17f2dvj0tunfq

Fictions. Been going back to books that make me believe citizens practicing their civic duty matter. And I do mean that citizenry that is and can go beyond the Left-Liberal divide, that one that knows exactly what’s up and is ready to put in the work for nation, on the belief that this IS a specific voice that we’ve lost through the years, a specific movement that has been dissolved into government, one that’s disappeared into historical disagreements among what is considered as “the opposition.” #RadioFreeVermont (2019) reveals many ways of winning when we seem to be paralyzed by disinformation and media, capitalism and the bureaucracy. It also reveals that what this demands is a level-up on creativity, a groundedness in the bigger picture, a sense of humor, and a whole lot of irreverence. And guess what: the people just might be revealed to be on our side. Sometimes (often) fiction gives us a sense of what we need, especially with only 16 months to go to 2022. #read #readingbooks #reading #bookshelf #bookshelfph #BillMcKibben #fiction #novel https://www.instagram.com/p/CKlPEoTBk5P/?igshid=5p4d35wilfct

Light. There’s something about talk of darkness that I distrust for its romance with the light. It might be that I feel like the darkest times are not in the present, but always in the past, if not the future. It could be that I’ve always found comfort in how our eyes adjust to the darkness, how we do end up seeing, far more than we thought we could when we walked into it, much in the same way that it happens for many things and places and moments unfamiliar. It could be because I grew up with my Lola Nena slowly losing her eyesight, and yet in that darkness she knew to adapt, to take heart, to ask that we read to her instead of losing the opportunity to hear (and tell) stories. It could be because if you’ve lived in this country the past four years, and especially the past 10 months, you would’ve lived in what might be defined as dark times, and this might have led to hopelessness and despair, and yet you would’ve also forged through it, because you can and you do, because there’s no other way. It could be because without the romance, we might simply do what we do when we enter a dark room: we ask where’s the light? then we find the switch, and flick it on. And it could be because with just darkness and light, devoid of romance, we become people who will simply put in the work of making sure the light’s always on. #Light #Darkness #Duterte #2022 https://www.instagram.com/p/CKeBBBihoP_/?igshid=1ilt34rk3vsmc

Root. We’ve had this plant forever, growing where my yaya, who retired years ago, had left it, as with many plants in the tiny garden I started tending during the lockdown. This year started with time spent there, repotting plants, releasing soil from pots I haven’t touched all year. There was comfort in being able to do this: finding roots, cleaning them, seeing where they could be taken apart, so one could make two or three of the same plant, move them across different pots, big and small, new and old. The same plant. But different. The strangeness of keeping something alive that’s been there long before I even cared. How some plants root and persist and propagate, regardless. How they survive. #halamanph #halaman #corazondemaria #pusonimaria https://www.instagram.com/p/CKIp3Xqh-cg/?igshid=pi47iieg3gz7

Color. This one’s a gift, even to me. This revised, revamped, reconfigured version of my first book of personal essays now ends with a postscript on how #Duterte made me a feminist, and with a blurb via @maracoson. @everythingsfineph delivers nationwide and elsewhere in the world! Click on link in bio to order. ❤️🇵🇭✊🏽 https://www.instagram.com/p/CHzdxxBBCvJ/?igshid=7zujdx7a0dke