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 the first-generation immigrant community, I struggled with navigating my diasporic identity. Using photography to search for answers, I use it to understand notions of home and belonging through 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 brought from Cebu, such as my old passport photo, an heirloom rosary, and a blue Camisa de Chino. My personal history is negotiated through the photographs of these objects; recontextualizing them guided me to create some semblance of answers in the present time.