Homing on and in Solidarity: Call and Response in an Anticipated Realm

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.

This fictive encounter between Philippine-based collectives, The Ohome and Gantala Press  and Womanifesto's core of senior artists is largely prompted by a question—what would it take to conceive feminist art history as lived call and response, in the vein of sub-altern sonography, like blues and jazz in fields and inconspicuous dives that challenge the narrowed bounds of time and place?

It is material to note that much of the musings behind this coaxing of distantiated presences (much like Womanifesto's Lasuemo digital courtyard in 2020) percolated under severe lockdown conditions (the Philippines only essentially opening up by 2022-23).  And so physically, patently felt constraint as well as the desire to stretch past spatial and relational limits underpin how extended processes, hits and misses, pitches and retreats, reach outs and withdrawals lace through what eventually came onsite in this microspace within Womanifesto's portal of portals enabled by historians, critics, artists, designers, among a whole slew of individuals seeing affinity with what has since been pegged as the Womanifesto way.

Off the Art Grid and Uneven Rhythms

It is with much counted on goodwill that these meanderings into the space and time of 'others' are proffered.  The hope too is that these interjections from the Ohome and Gantala would not register as brazen intrusions, but rather as genuine handshakes turning into tighter hugs over much extended time.  It would indeed be a stretch to say I was privy to Womanifesto's early venturing out to gather beyond the stricture of tightly curated and gate-keeped exhibitions over two decades ago.  Back then, I was very much steeped in the invisible labor supporting the work of more senior feminist researcher-curators and was thus, not as mobile.  Yet the spirit behind this present gesture, and Womanifesto's expressly moving away from the core sites of contemporary art in Thailand to the slowed and thus more organically set pace of village life in the first Womanifesto iterations became key signposts for my setting upon whom to entice to be part of this 'gathering'. This imagined tete-a-tete between generations and sites of work and relations thus draws from that impulse to find spots quiet and unencumbered enough to attempt interface.  The truth is, even by 2026, artists of the Ohome, Gantala, and Womanifesto have not 'met' in real life.   Yet the argument is made here that the inclination to work intuitively, attentively, and relationally makes a case for how such practices could be seen to unfold adjacently even when they do not intersect IRL.  I hazard to say Womanifesto would not desire to exercise proprietary claim on such a mode of doing that runs on a healthy regard for difference and situatedness, and it is this wager that I draw from in a call and response exercise triggered by Womanifesto's own diverse prompts to each other within radial reach during their own navigating of Covid containment.

Thus we have these hypothetical meetings between Womanifesto, the Ohome and Gantala, these non-so tactile but still felt stabs at interlocution proceeding upon such good faith premises.  At the core, the imagined parallel—of keeping at creative practices of care by preening one's ears, eyes, and soul to life in all its disorderly manifestations is easily recognizable. 

Sensing Feminist Research Methodology

Paying heed to Womanifesto, particularly at the juncture of Procreation/Postcreation (2003) and WeMend (2023-Present) and moving back as well further down its own chronology with artist-organizer positions of care shifting to mothering elder generations and their own selves, the life markers remain about tending to those who are still here and those who come after, all who keenly feel impinged on by structural weights, socially conditioned role assignments, and bodily encumbrances.

Gantala Press, whom we meet here through Faye Cura, runs a tight and agile ship from which it publishes, translates, and in the immersive process, aggregates voices of writers, peasant, and urban workers whose stories might not otherwise likely see the light of day.  Womanifesto's own pandemic gathering traces (such as Udorn: Pages of the Book, Udornthani, 2021, and even moreso, Unspoken, Sydney, 2021 ) lend diaristic and solicited text traces that take the tone of such intimated assemblies. Gantala Press makes itself present here through the stitched books of Cura, a poet, writer-editor, translator, activist.   At the height of the most violent and repressive phase of Rodrigo Duterte's redolent exacting of fascist medically-inflected excess,  Cura turned to stitching up threads of encrypted dissent. With this surreptitiously uttered talkback in made up language tucked into a blog, the code shields an archive of pain from erasure already waged through a range of extra judicial killings and parallel human rights infractions.

The Ohome (Aba Lluch Dalena, Len-Len Malgapo-Domingo, Yllang Montenegro, Zeke Sales, Alley Santos) launches outward or perhaps more apropos, upward from feminine tropes of unwieldy interior spaces, innards wrenching from abuse, repressed energy reeking through orifices materialized in a collaboratively sewn skirt punctured through sheer incorrigible pulse and pull. We find in their self-reckoning pegs strewn along as text and intermedia collage visibly shifting tracks - the madwoman (gaga), crease (fold), headwind/strongwind (amihan) - all indicative of defiant restiveness.  In their shared stories, we find folds opening up to warmth and space to breathe, safe spots to pause, take stock, and reach past refreshed selves readied to engage. The Ohome, like Gantala and imaginably by extension, Womanifesto with their voices from the courtyard prompts and responses from 2020 meet virtually but also in such zones of kindredness.  They position within sites where mindful baring and bearing might potently happen — in breathing space, unassuming home-apartments, in picnics, workshops with third culture progeny, persons deprived of liberty, among other mind-body-souls acceding to slowed, open-ended relational practice that veers away from merely proffering art as too precious to attempt and take in.

Trawling through the Womanifesto portal, one clearly senses that much of what has already been done hinges upon a sustained desire to know, to make, to coalesce, to be and do on terms, times and places that seek agentive pulse, in telling, not telling, in showing, not showing, in sharing, in holding back, and leaving and waiting for minds and bodies to shift and settle, then opening up to the flux of life and lives.  Participation and relationality do promise such frayed unevenness moreso amid self-reflexivity, situatedness, and attention to intersectionality alongside positionality.  Laying still and keeping apace to felt rhythms have always been key distinctive aspects of feminist research and these departures from hapless production in the artworld are certainly important overlays upon these art histories being written as running stitches turn into firmer knots.