Being Here and Now, Imagining Tomorrow

By Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez

The following text is an introduction to a joint contribution to the Womanifesto Way Anthology by The Ohome Collective, Gantala Press and Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez. To explore this contribution and its relations click here.

"We deem this Womanifesto as a work in progress, like Gantala Press. Any final version lies in the ultimate fate of women in the future". This forthright ellipsis appears in the print collective's enduringly unfinished work, its publishing manifesto (also eponymously Womanifesto) as it first went public in 2019. Readers today could take this as avowed sign of life in all its potent volatility posed against orthodoxies even within feminist thought.

To my mind, the serendipitously shared name, of Gantala's WIP document and Womanifesto (the Thai-based collective), signal a conjoining at the hip. While the Thailand-reared Womanifesto remains our primary hinge behind this portal's becoming, parallel agentive acts of naming and doing might here make the case for claiming operative affinities that underpin this positing of lateralities in fields distanced but crossing across time and space.

My own scramble for physical and affective sustenance during the cruel lockdowns amid Covid-19 brought me to Gantala Press's project Makisawsaw: Recipes x Ideas (2019), which were prescriptive texts twinning food and politics at a most auspicious historical moment.  To this fumbling cook and introvert activist, "makisawsaw" (literally, the call to dip in) literally and symbolically hit at the gut. Being a cancer patient confined at home with laughable cooking skills and figuring evasive measures to get at vegan supplies despite shuttered stores, the desperate tending to an alternative food regimen brought me to Gantala, and this felt like finding space to collectively figure and reach out from foisted solace. It was a lifeline in many respects. My decades' dalliance with Womanifesto felt very much like this familiar kindredness relished specially under duress even from afar.

Gantala's own Womanifesto tacks upon similarly resonant ideas and principles — remoulding, futurity, smallness, collectivity in process (writing, editing, translating), making room for vernacular texts over vetted literature, veering from the nod of institutions and hierarchical structures invested in keeping inequities operative.  Like Womanifesto, the press has kept itself nimble, shapeshifting as needed, taking to tracks it had at earlier points swore off and then reconsidered and maneuvered around--all these ultimately lending breadth and resonance in present work encountered by diverse publics.  

Early exchanges with Gantala Press's Faye Cura led to surfacing threads that were akin in tone, material, and process.  There was indeed Gantala's Publishing Manifesto to begin with.  I'd also found, among Womanifesto's intimate and intuition-driven exercises documented in their Gatherings blog entries compiled at various stages of isolation beginning 2020 that there had congealed a broad band of earnestly offered invitations to engage -- quiet but affectively wrought ventures--readings at a courtyard, shared salad recipes, exchanged postcards, passed around drawings, performance-conversations from clipped scripts--each proposition mindful of what might and could be done in crip time and space as the pandemic's hypersensate underpinnings latched on breath, color, sound, taste, and so on.

Gantala's and Womanifesto's deliberately calculated diminished scale, situatedness, choosing to remain bound to capacity as well as potency (bookmarked on Mao in Gantala's case) implicitly privileges process over polish.  Making room and deferring to untrained 
non-professional makers stakes upon the power of craft -- learning from and alongside communities, specifically peasant and labor sectors remains key to the artists' own decolonizing journeys.

By early February 2020, Gantala with the peasant advocate volunteers of Rural Women Advocates (RUWA) set upon Magtahi ay di biro (sewing/sowing is no joke), a sewing workshop-educational discussion on rice tariffication and its pushback on peasants' daily lives.  Intently learning from AMIHAN's National head, Nanay Zen Soriano then meant not only learning to blanket stitch, but construing a gendered imaginary of vulgarly skewed rural landscapes.  A month later, right before the onset of COVID-19 national emergency declaration, they were darning up participation for what would become a shelved exhibition about the "un-banning" of the Valerio Nofuente Collection, texts previously redlined under Ferdinand Marcos Sr.'s dictatorship. The collection contained key material on MAKIBAKA, a National Democratic women's organization formed under martial law. Gantala had hoped to collectively pore light on and in the process, enplace these historically.  With plans scuttled by institutional closures and finding herself forced into close quarters, Cura persisted in making the cloth book on Makibaka along with ideas she had been thinking and working through pre-lockdown.  Some 'pages' appear here as stitched and tactile enunciations on fabric--a soft membrane presenting a far less ponderous, easier to conceal, and literally lightweight mode that codifies deeply marking trauma and violence perpetrated by Rodrigo Duterte now (in 2026) seeing some magnitude of justice at the International Criminal Court at the Hague.  Gantala's iterative teaming up with RUWA in crafting peasant protest banners specifically for the peasant women's federation, AMIHAN National Federation of Peasant Women comes inlaid with consequent material and philosophical logic.  Cura relates:  "We piece together ideas, connecting the scraps of history by narrating the original works and narratives of the women who till the fields."  It is within this same telling about collective work that she mentions the critical need for writers like her to be reminded to foreground how peasant women bear the brunt of oppression from within and beyond the movement.

My eyes settle on Cura's pages and imagine my fingers running across the layered threads, recalling from Womanifesto's Gatherings that Nitaya Ueareeworakul in Udonthani had also shared intricately crafted diary pages (Moments + Differences) collaged on paper made onsite as the world slowed and that, also under pandemic strictures, Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Shuxia Chen wagered on a linguistic gamble.  They called it The Unspoken, a permittedly illegible but felt conversation which left space for unknowing through unraveled threads. This speculative toggling between space, time, and relational constrictions push minds and mind's eyes to winnow ways of work and work-arounds cutting across and outlining horizons of solidarity so direly needed to date.