A year after moving to Canada from the Philippines at age 17, I experienced an identity crisis. Child-like and naive feeling, I searched for comfort around me, but felt alien in my environment. I was holding on to what I knew from the past because I was afraid that I couldn’t succeed in what was meant to be my new home. Often overlooked by society, I struggled with navigating my diasporic identity. Using photography to search for answers, I use it to expand the ideas of home and belonging by combining tradition and history in a new community.
Finding Comfort Under the Sky is a conversation between the past and the present in an attempt to reconcile my cultural duality between Canada and the Philippines. The past is present in the objects I brought from Cebu, such as my old passport photo, an heirloom rosary, and a blue Camisa de Chino. My personal history are negotiated through the photographs of these object. Recontextualizing them in the present time, I use it to bridge the different parts of my world that allow me to establish a syncretic identity.