Liryc Dela Cruz

Liryc Dela Cruz is a Rome-based artist and filmmaker originally from Mindanao, Philippines. Dela Cruz’s exploration of his origins, his biography, and social psychology grounds a multifaceted practice that includes film as well as performance, and that centers community gatherings and collective co-creation as tools of artistic research. His work expands thematically into the arenas of care, indigenous and decolonial practices, the transpacific trade of enslaved people, and notions of hospitality in pre- and post-colonial Philippines.

In his first solo exhibition, Il Mio Filippino: For Those Who Care To See, Dela Cruz continues his multi-year research on the Philippine’s diaspora in Italy, parts of which were conducted at Mattatoio’s Prender-si Cura research residency and artistic production programme in 2022. Dela Cruz focuses on domestic workers, seeking to understand the states of exhaustion and practices of care and rest that are associated with their lives.

The Il Mio Filippino (My Filipino) exhibition’s title refers to the widespread practice of associating the Filipino community with domestic labour, a prejudice that the artist experienced first-hand upon his arrival in Italy, with little room left to imagine Filipinas and Filipinos outside of this particular line of work, prompting Dela Cruz’s long-standing engagement with the subject. Migrant-workers from the Philippines (Overseas Filipino Workers), lauded in their country of origin as “bagong bayani” (the modern (s)heroes) for their significant economic contribution to the economy via regular remittances, are framed as model migrants and tireless labourers, particularly in the Italian context. Dela Cruz critiques this fictitious social structure, which exacerbates the pressure placed on Filipino and Filipina individuals to abandon their identity in favour of the passive and loyal guise that is reified in their country of origin and in the countries where they find employment and settle.

The exhibition presents a video installation composed of four videos, three of which are the product of Dela Cruz’s documentation of several Filipina domestic workers cleaning the homes of their employers. Displayed on 42-inch monitors, the videos are edited to recall CCTV systems used in the surveillance of public and private spaces, reflecting on the colonial processes of control and racialization which fix othered bodies and identities within their gaze and frame, while simultaneously assigning them an inferior position within a self-referential and white supremacist hierarchy. By creating juxtapositions between images and the dystopian sound composition, the videos in the installation evoke a choreography of robotic, militarised labour, in which the memorised gestures of care by the individual body are incorporated with other bodies in an impersonal and aseptic structure, without dreams and visions. The care work is ultimately devoid of care. It is an invisibilized and outsourced labour.

The fourth film, presented in the largest format, features a sleeping woman, presumably a domestic worker in an Italian home. In this work, Dela Cruz uses colour for the first time, teasing the imaginative power that the body can embrace, and immersing it in a vivid landscape of rest. As if to protect the video’s sleeping subject at this moment of vulnerability, the artist conceived a filigree chamber crafted from kulambo – mosquito net mesh – which creates a provisional sanctuary around the screen. A recurring element in the artist’s work, this fabric is deployed to shield the subject from the external, intrusive gaze. The sleeping subject thus appears to be in a state of calm, stillness, and deceleration: a conducive state for dreamy new visions, imagination and narratives of renewal, a journey back to their own social geography in which their agency is not governed by idealising or reductive standards.

The contents of her subconscious seem to echo through the exhibition space in the form of a sound structure that is at once dystopian and alienating, and yet still occasionally soft and tranquil. The tension created by Dela Cruz between the intrusive gaze and the obstructing mesh adds a crucial layer to the work that strips it of a purely documentary intent. Dela Cruz is intervening in the viewer’s ways of seeing; in their perception of the situation and implicating them in the involuntary voyeurism they are engaging in as soon as they enter the scenography of the installation.

The slowness of Dela Cruz’s films, a central element of his signature style, considers the idea of public vs. private spatiality, and the social constellations of pre-colonial Philippines in an attempt to retrieve the concept of rest from its negative associations with laziness and unproductivity. In his work, Dela Cruz exposes the complexities inherent in the concept of care: reified and precise patterns of work, rest and identity, all of which are rooted in the complex history of the Philippines and the impact of more than 420 years of Spanish colonialism (1521-1898), American imperialism (1898-1946) and Japanese occupation (1941-1945), and the Ferdinand Marcos Sr. dictatorship (1972-1986) on the archipelago.

Upon entering and leaving the exhibition space, each visitor receives a stamp on their hand. The text that is left on the visitor’s skin is the title of the exhibition in capital letters: IL MIO FILIPPINO. Through this action, Dela Cruz plays with the hierarchy of language by fixing the same immutability that is projected onto the identities of Filipino and Filipina communities and rooted in colonial ideology on the visitor’s body. On the other hand, Dela Cruz also reappropriates notions of the self where the phrase ‘My Filipino’ functions as an imperative for the community to reclaim ownership over the social, metaphorical and actual self.

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 nume- rous 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, 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 col- laborated 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 2018, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival identified Dela Cruz as one of the budding leaders of the “Slow Cinema” movement. In 2020, he was selected as one of the young emerging filmmakers of Berlinale Talents during the 70 Berlin International Film Festival.

Liryc 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 Con- temporary) 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 is also a mentor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy, where he presented his research & Hospitality: Tools for the Revolution. 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 concepts of intimacy and eroticism in pre-colonial Philippines.