Liryc Dela Cruz | Il mio filippino

Il mio filippino (trans. my Filipino)  is a multimedia performance based on a research that has engaged the artist for several years, on the basis of an astonishing documentation of the routine of 'care and cleaning gestures' by Filipino domestic workers. It is meant to be an invitation to rethink and reflect on the questions: how to be equal and recognise the invisibility of others? Who are these people who clean the world?

The intention of Dela Cruz's work is to reconcile the exhausted bodies of these precious domestic helpers with the earth and the soil through rituals and knowledge of the indigenous Filipinos, asking the question: how do we eliminate the illusions of love towards the employer's house, which prevent society from seeing the real condition of these people?

In the pre-colonial Philippines, the care of spaces has always been associated with the way people relate to nature. Care is the central form of coexistence with the visible and invisible elements in the environment. In the course of the long period of Spanish colonisation, the slave trade across the Pacific, the American and Japanese occupation, and dictatorship, caring finds a new definition, as does the body, and its gestures and movements. The expression 'my Filipino' was coined in the mid-1980s following the influx of Filipinos to Italy in the 1970s. Italy has become the place with the most significant Filipino diaspora in the European Union. This labour force is and feels invisible.  This project is not meant to trigger a sense of guilt, it is rather an invitation to look closely and perceive the exhausted bodies and invisible and neglected movements. Quoting Françoise Vergès: 'While we try to clean/sanitise the wounds of the past, we must also clean/sanitise the wounds that are inflicted today... While we heal the past we must simultaneously heal the present damage that increases the exposure to death of millions of people in the global south. The past is our present and it is in this uncertain temporality that the future can be imagined'.

direction, concept, research and choreography
Liryc Dela Cruz

performers
Benjamin Vasquez Barcellano Jr, Sheryl Palbacal Aluan and Jenny Guno Llanto

in collaboration with
Benjamin Vasquez Barcellano Jr, Flora Ventura, Sheryl Palbacal Aluan, Jenny Guno Llanto, Tess Magallanes, Daisy Magallanes, Jessica Duque

with
Benjamin Vasquez Barcellano Jr, Flora Ventura, Sheryl Palbacal Aluan, Jenny Guno Llanto, Tess Magallanes, Daisy Magallanes, Jessica Duque

length: 45’