Ubos Sa Dagat: The Under Sea

For the web residency »Tools for Citation« cultural, plant, and body worker Khokhoi (mary alinney villacastin) investigates archival and embodied research of Indigenous ecosystems, cultures, histories, and knowledges from the archipelago now known as the Philippines. The web project Ubos sa Dagat: The Under Sea experiments with a series of movement-based videos and spiraling »fin-notes,« to reimagine the colonial archive by uncovering histories and memories connected to Indigenous islander traditions.

Khokhoi (mary alinney villacastin), Bantayan / Philippines — Feb. 4, 2025

Khokhoi (mary alinney villacastin), Ubos sa Dagat: The Under Sea. Archival images collected from the Folger Shakespeare Library / Underwater photography by Basorerong Parat © the artist.

Shot from the point of view of an enchanted freediver led vertically down into the ocean through the whispering spirit of a marine sanctuary guardian, the web project Ubos sa Dagat: The Under Sea invites re-Indigenization of the colonial archive. As the guardian spirit chronicles the passage through space-time, she cites from premodern records of colonial encounters and alludes to stolen material artifacts – all of which simultaneously emerge, liquefy, and dissolve in waves of submerged memory.

Deeper depths increase the density of pressure and reveal pulsating glimmers of the animated references: A pause at the bottom of the sea, where history is decayed yet preserved, propels the release to the surface. Thus, freediving – the traditional embodied knowledge of islander fisherfolk – becomes the referential techno-ecology to access global timelines in native recollection.

Floating between the present tense, precolonial imaginaries, and postcolonial myths, Ubos sa Dagat: The Under Sea reckons with the wreckage of the imperial colonial archive and meditates through Indigenous islander memory. Rather than sinking into an Orientalist play of a primitive fantasy past, the speculative optics of archival recovery projects the legacy of islander sovereignty and rewritten decolonial futures.

Ubos sa Dagat: The Under Sea will be a series of videos, all placed into a revolving carousel – a scrollable, spiraling list of fin-notes (no feet for mermaids!), mimicking the movements in diving. The project itself becomes a localized archive of historical memory.

This project-in-process began during Khokhoi’s Artist Research Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library (August – November 2024). Research materials come primarily from their premodern European collection, along with maps, manuscripts, and material artifacts digitalized in the Library of Congress and the Mapping Philippine Material Culture catalog made available by SOAS.