July 3 at 5 PM to July 31
In the windows of Co-Prosperity – 3219 S Morgan, Chicago

Finally, I arrive. There is my mother, waiting for me. Does she need anything? She admits, “Maginaw nang kaunti.” Somewhere else, I think, Here is the place where my Tagalog is perfect.

All along the way had been a thousand blankets I could have gathered, pulled across states, an ocean, a forest of pine and birch, and billowed onto her small shoulders. Instead, my hands are pale and empty.

So picture, like I did, a doubling: a wide, vacant duvet cover you fold in half. Enough for a warm night in a winter monsoon (let’s say), or a cool night in this kind of summer. Thick. Crumpling over you.

You can stick out your limbs if it gets too hot.

Now, wake up. Pakiramdam mo you are untethered in water.

There is a thought that runs in your family and into you: that a strange feeling in your body has its origin in someone you love.

Wonder whose ghosts meet up with yours. Where is your mother dreaming?

Pakiramdam, meaning intuition or feeling, explores how distances both actual and metaphorical render the real as otherworldly, and ways that kinship connects us across such distances. It encodes a personal history of immigration, migration, parentage, and embodiments of hybridity along the way, bringing the ghostly and human into a single space. In the project, ghosts are not just representations of the past, they are disembodied presences who are a phone call, text message, or video chat—a technological “seance”—away. Meanwhile, to be human is to contend with demands for exactitude, specific locations in space and time, and visible manifestations of identity.

The fabric panels reference family photos taken in the Philippines and, later, Sweden, household objects that relate to the family’s origins, and the Barong Tagalog and Filipiniana dresses, traditional Filipino garments that have elements reflecting the Spanish colonial era. Painted on the windows, a comic illustrates a simple act of folding bed linens. With overlays and layerings that include viewers’ reflections in the glass, the project interrogates distinctions between body and person, stranger and self, parent and child, or immigrant and local; between absence and presence, especially when only distanced interaction is possible; and, within the multifaceted (or multiracial) identity, between authenticity and synthesis.

As the viewing angle changes, our ghost and human bodies come together and shift apart.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Alex Kostiw, Bridgeport, Chicago, Co-prosperity, Pakiramdam