Listening to Silence
May 2025
7.5  x 4.75 in
124 pages
Edition of _

This piece explores how silence holds and protects the past, focusing on the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines (1972–1986). Silence is often mistaken for absence, but it is a record: of the regime's suppression of dissent and of the underground movement's survival. I trace how people preserved knowledge through documents collected from the personal collections of former activists informed by oral accounts from my father and his comrades. Today, with a second Marcos president and ongoing attempts to rewrite the past, these unofficial and informal ways of record-keeping are more urgent(ly needed) than ever. If we learn to listen closely, silence reveals a different kind of history.

Part of my MFA thesis project at Pratt.

︎ Read PDF here.

︎ Read manuscript here.