Listening to Silence

05/2025

Playing with Legibility #3 (Nov. 2024)

Silence is often framed as absence that needs to be filled. But silence is not empty. In fact, it shapes how memory survives in the wake of a decades-long repression. In the case of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, silence was not just a method of domination; it was also a tool of survival and resistance. This thesis examines the persistence of these silences in the Martial Law years, that this presence challenges historiography. I explore how the underground movement–of which my father was a member–against the Marcos regime resisted conventional documentation. By foregrounding ephemeral, oral, and embodied forms of remembering, I argue that some histories don’t belong in books or archives—not because they must be forgotten, but because they were never meant to be contained in such forms. To understand these histories fully, we must rethink not just what is documented, but how history itself is recorded, carried, and passed on.

What is silence? Is it truly the absence of sound? Or is it something more?

Graduate Inquiries Exhibition at Pratt Institute (Dec. 2024)

Puppetry as Embodied Storytelling

Through material and movement, puppets animate stories beyond the spoken word.

Bogs (left) and Matanda puppets (December 2024). Developed with the guidance of Prof. Theodora Skipitares.

The Form of History

To commit a history of resistance to a book is to risk making it too neat. Once something is given a place in any official record, it becomes easier to distort, to overwrite, to erase.

Selected spreads from IV. The Form of History of my thesis book (May 2025)