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Crude Conversations

Chatter Marks EP 48 Exploring and documenting the Filipino diaspora with Melissa Chimera

Crude Conversations

crudemag

Society & Culture

5884 Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2022

⏱️ 76 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Melissa Chimera creates mixed media paintings and installations that are research-based investigations into species extinction, globalization and human migration. Her portraits are fictional, but they’re based in empirical fact. She combs through the public record of peoples’ lives, collecting information to better understand them beyond what DNA can tell us. She includes elements and details of what she finds into her paintings. She says that the Philippines are a confluence of so many tragedies. Politically, economically and environmentally. There’s really no work for the people who aren’t middle class. So they move, they immigrate for opportunity and to send money back to their family. This is the story that Melissa is telling, the one she’s trying to better understand. As a descendant of Filipino and Lebanese immigrants herself, it’s a personal one. She’s currently in-residence at the Anchorage Museum, exploring the Filipino diaspora through research and interviews. To help make sense of all this information, she’s putting two podcasts together. “Drift: Immigration and Identity in America” is an interview series, and “Land and People” looks at practitioners and people with ancestral ties to the land. There’s also a component of cataloging what the land looks like right now for future reference. She says that as she’s interviewing people they’re also unpacking the psychology of internalized racism and what that looks like and what it feels like. It’s complicated because there are so many facets to this project — there’s immigration, there’s the socioeconomic issues, the cost of living and it’s all under the umbrella of capitalism. Photo courtesy of Josh Branstetter

Transcript

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0:00.0

I often think about if my ancestors were trying to come to this country today, they couldn't.

0:18.4

They just couldn't.

0:20.0

It wouldn't have been possible.

0:21.9

We brought them over for cheap labor.

0:24.8

That still happens to some degree.

0:26.6

It's just hard.

0:28.2

It's really, really hard now.

0:32.2

So I am just always feeling lucky that through my birth, I inherited so much and I want to

0:40.6

give that back to people who are trying to get here or trying to make a better life or

0:45.1

just trying to exist.

0:47.3

That was Melissa Camera.

0:48.9

She creates mixed media paintings and installations that are research-based investigations into species

0:54.3

extinction, globalization, and human migration.

0:58.4

Her portraits are fictional, but they're based on empirical fact.

1:01.9

She cometh through the public record of people's lives, collecting information to better understand

1:06.2

them beyond what DNA can tell us.

1:09.1

She includes elements and details of what she finds into her paintings.

1:13.6

She says that the Philippines are a confluence of so many tragedies, politically, economically,

1:19.6

and environmentally.

1:21.2

There's really no work for the people who aren't middle-class, so they move, they immigrate,

1:26.4

for opportunity, and to send money back to their family.

1:30.0

This is the story that Melissa is telling, the one she's trying to better understand,

...

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