Curated by Johanne Affricot e Eric Otieno Sumba
Liryc Dela Cruz is a Rome-based artist and filmmaker originally from Mindanao, Philippines. Dela Cruz’s exploration of his origins, his biography, and social psychology grounds a multifaceted practice that includes film as well as performance, and that centers community gatherings and collective co-creation as tools of artistic research. His work expands thematically into the arenas of care, indigenous and decolonial practices, the transpacific trade of enslaved people, and notions of hospitality in pre- and post-colonial Philippines.
In his first solo exhibition, Il Mio Filippino: For Those Who Care To See, Dela Cruz continues his multi-year research on the Philippine’s diaspora in Italy, parts of which were conducted at Mattatoio’s Prender-si Cura research residency and artistic production programme in 2022. Dela Cruz focuses on domestic workers, seeking to understand the states of exhaustion and practices of care and rest that are associated with their lives.
The Il Mio Filippino (My Filipino) exhibition’s title refers to the widespread practice of associating the Filipino community with domestic labour, with little room left to imagine Filipinas and Filipinos outside of this particular line of work, prompting Dela Cruz’s long-standing engagement with the subject. Dela Cruz critiques this fictitious social structure, which exacerbates the pressure placed on Filipino and Filipina individuals to abandon their identity in favour of the passive and loyal guise that is reified in their country of origin and in the countries where they find employment and settle.
The exhibition presents a video installation composed of four videos, three of which are the product of Dela Cruz’s documentation of several Filipina domestic workers cleaning the homes of their employers, juxtaposed with a fourth film, presented in the largest format, which features a sleeping woman. As if to protect the video’s sleeping subject at this moment of vulnerability, the artist conceived a filigree chamber crafted from kulambo – mosquito net mesh – which creates a provisional sanctuary around the screen. These videos, alongside a dystopian sound composition, reflect critically on the colonial processes of control and racialization which fix othered bodies and identities within a gaze and frame and expose the complexities inherent in the concept of care.
By rendering this dynamic apparent, Dela Cruz negotiates potential for the social, metaphorical and actual reappropriation of the self, teasing the imaginative power that the body can embrace, and immersing it in a vivid landscape of rest: a journey back to their own social geography in which their agency is not governed by idealising or reductive standards.
Liryc Dela Cruz is an artist and filmmaker from Tupi, South Cotabato in Mindanao, Philippines based in Rome, Italy. His work has been performed and shown at numerous international film festivals and contemporary art venues, including: Locarno Film Festival, Matadero (Madrid), La Neomudéjar (Madrid), Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris), UK New Artist, Artissima (Turin), Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO), Teatro di Roma (Rome), La Biennale di Venezia and Ocean Space (Venice).
At a young age, Dela Cruz received the Bamboo Camera Award from the Father of independent cinema in the Philippines, Kidlat Tahimik. Dela Cruz has collaborated with and been mentored by the independent cinema’s master filmmaker Lav Diaz, alongside figures such as Hadji Balajadia, Françoise Vergès, Simon Njami, Gutierrez Mangansakan, Chantal Akerman, and Anna Daneri. In 2018, the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival identified Dela Cruz as one of the budding leaders of the "Slow Cinema" movement. In 2020, he was selected as one of the young emerging filmmakers of Berlinale Talents during the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, Berlinale.
Liryc Dela Cruz's films are thematically related to his origins, history, biography and interiority, while his performances and research are focused on care, hospitality, indigenous practices, decolonial practices, post-colonial Philippines, and the transpacific trade of enslaved people. In 2021, Dela Cruz debuted his ongoing research project Il Mio Filippino as a performance at Teatro India - Teatro Nazionale in Rome, in collaboration with Filipino domestic and care workers. In 2020 the project received the Artissima - Torino Social Impact Art Award. Dela Cruz also participated in Mattatoio di Roma’s Prender-si cura residency programme in 2022.
Dela Cruz was selected as fellow at the TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary) Ocean Fellowship, where he initiated a project based on indigenous care and hospitality in the Philippines, drawing from the diary of Antonio Pigafetta titled Ocean as a Space of Perpetual Care. In 2023 he was selected as one of the artists in residence by the Academy in Exile at Freie Universität Berlin, and as a participating artist of Santarcangelo Festival for the IN EX(ILE) LAB 2023-2024. Dela Cruz is also a mentor at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy, where he presented his research & Hospitality: Tools for the Revolution. Dela Cruz has performed at the 59th Venice Biennale under the Sami Pavilion and aabaakwaad. In 2023, he premiered his new research performance Kay Kami Mga Mananap (Because We Are Beasts) in Udine Far East Film Festival, a reimagination of the artist on the concept of intimacy and eroticism in pre-colonial Philippines.
