Nicolei Buendia Gupit’s Our Seas Interwoven
“On Labor’s Unethical Undercurrents: An Artist’s Reflections at Intersections of Materiality, Legacy, Loss, and Diaspora”
By Dr. Marlaina Martin
As an anthropologist, many of the themes motivating Nicolei Buendia Gupit’s solo exhibition, Our Seas Interwoven, speak to me not only for the way that content mirrors form but also for the spotlight it is not only willing but incensed to cast on the experiences of those who often fall through gaps of social, cultural, political and historical recognition.
First, Homi Bhabha’s attestation that the realities of life and living often exceed, overwhelm, and even defy the capacities of the written word. In the face of such limits, Nicolei Buendia Gupit uses a personal yet technically adept and resourceful artistic practice to shine a light on the lacks that can pervade historical narratives, especially those written by a political elite who have imagined their needs and fates apart from society’s most marginalized. Narratives, even those housed in archives for decades if not centuries, are human-made and thus must be valuable for what they reveal. They must also be confronted for the voices, legacies, and contributions they center and deem worth saving and how. It is for this reason that many mainstream or dominant archives have notable–at times, unfillable–gaps in documentation and tone.
One of the most powerful undercurrents in Gupit’s Our Seas Interwoven is its sincere and outright commitment to the frame of the personal. First, it treats the artist’s own story and those familial stories accessible, inaccessible, and newly made accessible as legitimate in their own right because they are tales of aspirational and ambitious humanity; however complex, ideologically belittled, and structurally interrupted. Furthermore, as is common in Black Feminist Anthropological traditions, the personal serves as a lens from which to engage much longer, deeper, fuller, and holistic experiences of labor and loss, struggle and survival, finance and family, determination and death, as well as resource and recognition. Gupit’s artistic meditations in her sixth solo exhibition dare to step into the harrowingly messy but necessary terrain of a globalized economy that is not broadly thought about in terms of the individual lives it affects and too often claims.
As an artist working across media, Gupit treads into the choppy waters of privilege, power, disparity, and dispossession with a focus on the symbolic power of materiality. Using creative practices that intentionally play with and take advantage of visitors’ ability to simultaneously and differently experience time and space, her utilization of sculpture and video tap into the crucially nonchronological nature of her journey into themes of diaspora, work, migration, displacement, and danger.
As a notable practice in Gupit’s creative arsenal, papermaking, along with cast net-weaving, and video are material processes that demand a mastery of skill sets but are often underacknowledged either for their ubiquity or for their association with the masses, as opposed to a cultural elite. Building on the tense interrelated semantics of these foundation blocks, the forms that Gupit designed to speak to an extremely complicated ancestral history and cultural legacy that is often strategically minimized to protect the image of those behind its figurative curtain of operations.
Gupit’s use of juxtaposition is immensely impactful because it uses seemingly simple choices of what and where to contrast aspects of pieces to open up what are quite vast, even existential questions for many: Whose lives are worth recognizing? Whose labor? What are the human costs of the global economy and what systems maintain their invisibilization? The projected video of moving water over an wall-bound airplane made of handmade paper reflects several ethics-laden issues. Whether flying above water or indicative of lives lost beneath its tides, what are the fates of these people’s remains, what legacies and duties have they been stolen from, and to what level of acknowledgment and accountability at whose hands? Also, in naming the piece ‘Paper Airplane’, what evocations of childhood and innocence are betrayed immediately upon seeing and then learning of the piece’s actual artistic intentions? Especially upon realizing that pulverized lottery scratcher tickets are embedded in the body of its familiar shape, questions of luck, fate, and familial duty emanate from the fragile and precarious likeness of a figure often associated with movement, progress, and a determined, promising destination.
Turning to the coffin-outfitted suitcase topped by live-but-decaying flowers, what commentary might be discernible as it concerns the objectification of certain laboring communities both in life and death? In the most ideal of contexts, coffins are final resting places purchased to honor, respect, and name the fallen. However, in nearing this artwork, the accouterments of a coffin are affixed to the shell of a suitcase, rooting the memories of these people in continued movement, unrooting, and instability. The flowers on top, just as these legacies, sit on the cusp of mortality on the shared edge of being remembered and lost. Without the intentional work that Gupit insists on doing on multiple scales (through this particular piece, the exhibition as a whole, and themes of loss and longing fueling her larger body of work), the decay might completely take over. However, she is determined not only to retrieve and remember but also to recall and relearn her legacy in and through her own body. Here, she embarked on incorporating yet another layer of material manipulation into the exhibition’s story: that of weaving cast nets to commemorate and connect with those ancestors she can and cannot name. Weaving together elements of tactile and lineage memory, Our Seas Interwoven is aptly titled for its call on viewers to more fully consider the making and forsaking done by dominant narratives shaping our increasingly global (and spottily attentive) understandings of what it means to not just be recognized but to live in a world invested in hierarchies of human experience. Furthermore, in line with the rich symbolic and spiritual legacies of conduits such as water and craft-making, Gupit backgrounds prewritten scripts of transnational belonging to foreground the flexibly intimate roles of materiality and relationality in shouldering the costs of labor paid by the very people most disenfranchised by, vulnerable to, and enrolled to enact and enable its terms.
“Reaping the Tide”
By Hannah Nantes
The thread of the migrant worker’s story has two ends: the place of origin and the place of supposed promise.
The first can go this way: It is the first decade of the 2000s. A box arrives, declared and lugged from the post office. There’s Nesquik, Aunt Jemima’s syrup, Victoria’s Secret lotions, Nikes that fit you if you’re in luck, bits and bobs covered by a ridiculously large and overly fragrant comforter. Parents will look at each other, wondering what to do with the last item in the swelter of tropical evenings. That morning, pancakes are served instead of a rice meal. That evening, said parents casually suggest, as the scent of Febreze hovers over everyone: “You should go to nursing school.”
During those years, Nursing was the golden ticket—a deliberate choice aimed specifically for employment in the United States or Canada.1 It differs by the decade, but there is always that call for swathes of Brown bodies to be deployed elsewhere as professionals, laborers, entertainers, teachers—the earliest being farmers or agricultural workers, arguably the humblest being domestic helpers.2 By this time, generations have seen this as the norm of desire. Not even the exception; it would be strange, unambitious, or weak-willed if you haven't even once considered trying your luck on other shores.
Because, in truth, what was the alternative? What if you stayed? (Don’t be ridiculous.)
The Philippine government has been consistent in its programmatic export of human capital for the past 50 years.3 With this support, migration’s monetary returns have steadily grown. The latest number for remittances by Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) and immigrants sent to their families back home accounts for 8.3% of the country’s GDP in 2024.4 On the one hand, it is an institutional response to global trends for employment. On the other hand, the number portends a dependence condoned by a government that can hardly fix its own economic troubles.5 But, overall, to imagine this country without this mass exportation of Filipino people is impossible.
These factors contribute to the ease with which any Filipino can choose to find work and life elsewhere. The reasons behind it are unsurprising, but the ease with which we turn to it is frightening. That thread in this story is dangled over too many grasping hands, regardless of wherever or however it goes. When it turns into tragic headlines marked by violence and brutality, it is just another regular occurrence.6 For a time during the 90s, there was public clamor over the execution of Flor Contemplacion, a domestic worker in Singapore, and the sentencing of Sarah Balabagan, then situated in the UAE. But other cases of exploitation, abuse, and deaths–even when reported in the papers and well into the 2000s–were met with hardly any outcry except from family members and migrant advocacy groups. For every parent seen photographed in tears waiting for a body at the airport, there are perhaps a thousand others who urge their children to take up that in-demand course. The weight of those boxes from the post office is simply heavier than any casket.
There is a case to be made about the numbers pointing to abuses being concentrated more toward certain professions and regions, such as domestic work in the Middle East.7 Working and migrating to Western countries is presumably safer. If anything, the long history of our immigration to the U.S. and the current size of this transplanted population indicate better pay and conditions, relative to what is happening elsewhere (and the record of discrimination8 waved off as inconsequential and forgiven). That is the promise, at least—generations of it.
Nicolei Buendia Gupit’s works begin from this end of the thread. Gupit recounts her mother’s and kin’s path to the U.S. in her previous show Mother/Land, touching on the gamble of a better life, the price is an estrangement from family and identity. Our Seas Interwoven holds on to the lambat or fishing net as a motif, but also as its framework for breadth and its method. She returns again and again to things that can be recomposed and enmeshed into one another. Fiber and pulp, glue and knotting. What necessity has forced apart in the past, she pieces together, seeking wholeness in the composite of sacrifices, from the trivial to the tragic, for a future that is the artist's own present.
And what is that present?
From the local perspective, as she belongs to the second generation to have the aegis of full legality, her family’s narrative can be superficially taken as a success story, a gamble done well. That is to be secure enough in employment and social standing that one has the freedom to visit the country easily, conveniently, and still have a place to come back to. Our term for these returnees is balikbayan—those who return to the country; in reality, held aloft as heroes both by a government that sees them as economic pawns and by relatives that regard them as welcome curiosities, with identities that are neither here nor there. Still, it is a success by the measure of some, but in saying so, it downplays what it took to get there and to stay there.9
Gupit’s work comes at a strange time, though, when a version of that homeward trip may not be as fortuitous.
The promise of “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”10 under Trump 2.0 is one that will inevitably shake its fourth-largest immigrant population if unchecked. The estimated 350,000 undocumented workers and non-citizens working on legalization would be the largest target from the Filipino community.11 Exemplified by this month’s deportations of Venezuelans purportedly covered by the Alien Enemies Act, there is also a chance there would be little to no opportunity to defend or prepare themselves through due process.12 Perhaps of equal or greater relevance is the attempt to dismantle birthright citizenship13 and tighter rules in family reunification channels; both have been the true stepping stones for anyone working more for their children than themselves. All of these threats have been apparent enough that there have been calls by the Philippine Embassy in the U.S. for those possibly affected to give up and go back. Either that or “keep a low profile,”14 a remark tinged with the hapless idea that being a model minority saves anyone.
But, really, go back to what? Likely, to the same forces that had pushed them out, only worse because of the full-blown dependence on their existence.
It’s possible to cling to the hope that these are early days in terms of this anti-immigration push, but much can still change for the worse. The tenuous situation is reflected in the evocations of the bodies of water in Gupit’s pieces: much like how the ebb and flow fills a fisherman’s net, the one thing that is certain for any migrant worker’s life now is uncertainty.
[1] Eugenio, L. (2024). From U.S. Reign to Brain Drain: The Mass Emigration of Filipino Nurses to the United States. Harvard International Review.
[2] Ang, A. (2007). Workers’ remittances and economic growth in the Philippines. Social Research Center, University of Santo Tomas.
[3] Ang, A., & Tiongson, E. (2023). Philippine migration journey: Processes and programs in the migration life cycle. World Bank.
[4] Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. (2025). Personal Remittances Reach a Record High of US$3.7 Billion in December 2024; Full-Year Level of US$38.3 Billion Highest to Date.
[5] ‘“With massive unemployment being generated by trade liberalization in industry and agriculture and the government unable to promote economic activities that would absorb those being displaced, Filipinos turned to the global marketplace. One administration after another encouraged this trend. Indeed, although the government did not dare admit it, labor export became the country’s macroeconomic strategy.”‘
Bello (2011) in San Juan, D. (2013). Philippine Labor Export Policy: A Critical Review. De La Salle University-Manila. Preprint.
[6] Eugenio, L. (2023). Overseas Filipino Workers: The Modern-Day Heroes of the Philippines. Harvard International Review.
[7] Ramos, C. (2021, March 8). Nearly 5K Cases of OFW Maltreatment Recorded in 2020. Inquirer Global Nation
[8] Flores, M. G. (2004). Images from the past: Stereotyping Filipino immigrants in California. Historical Perspectives: Santa Clara University Undergraduate Journal of History, Series II, 9(1).
[9] Ta-ay, K. and Geronimo, D. (2024).The Filipino Labor Diaspora in the United States: A Narrative of Colonization, Perseverance, and Opportunities. Asia Matters for America.
[10] American Civil Liberties Union. (n.d.). Trump on Immigration.
[11] No One Is Safe: Filipinos in U.S. Fear Trump Immigration Crackdown. (2025, February 9). Inquirer Global Nation.
[12] Appeals Court Won’t Halt Order Barring Trump Administration from Deportations Under Alien Enemies Act. (2025, March 26). PBS News.
[13] What Is Birthright Citizenship, and Could Trump End It? (2024, December 9). PBS News.
[14] DFA official asks Pinoy TNTs to lie low, legalize stay. (2025, January 26). Manila Standard.