Shaping a Speculative Glossary of Hybrid Sea Creatures in the West Philippine Sea
🗓️ Wednesday, 24 June — 9:30am
- 10:10am
(40 mins)
Presenters
Image
Abstract
The West Philippine Sea is a militarised and heavily trafficked maritime corridor where geopolitical force, ecological precarity, and fisher livelihood collide, and official vocabularies often fail to hold lived experience. Media narratives are easily manipulated, while the knowledge of those who work the sea is embodied and intergenerational, hard to document without flattening it. This knowledge lent itself to subjective mapping, where lived experience is treated as data rather than noise. The mapping process documents movement, risk, and survival at sea: tides, tuna highways, fish as product vs crew sustenance, foreign vessels, and no-go zones. The process then evolves through speculative image-making and iterative studio-led inquiry into a glossary of artist-imagined hybrid sea creatures, grounded in situated observation and circulating coastal narratives.These imagined creatures draw from Philippine mythology, real marine life, and the lived experience of those affected by the territorial frictions in the area. The creatures operate as composite witnesses shaped by militarisation and encroachment, making conditions perceptible without reducing them to policy speech or media templates. Their playfulness makes trauma legible without turning it into spectacle; it registers the sea’s trauma, its inhabitants, and those who rely on it.Removed from the context of the artwork, the glossary of creatures preserves this endangered conceptual world in an alternate way. The glossary is not stagnant. Creatures are added and altered with every iteration and representation across different artworks. Collaboration and co-thinking push new forms of invention, and new ways of naming pressure, adaptation, and survival. Each iteration is used to reveal something different within the context of a given piece. This fluidity of the glossary is precisely what makes it an endangered conceptual world: it is continually pressured by militarisation, ecological loss, and narrative capture.
Biography
Josephine Turalba is a Filipina interdisciplinary artist, PhD candidate in Studio Art at Burren College of Art, University of Galway, and Director of the Artistic Research Center at Philippine Women’s University. Her practice-based research develops speculative, hydrofeminist approaches that use play as a critical method to engage with trauma, power, and minor epistemologies. Grounded in situated knowledge and lived experience, her work explores how artistic research can open alternative ways of sensing, narrating, and understanding sociopolitical realities in the West Philippine Sea.
Ari Turalba is an emerging interdisciplinary artist whose work moves across photography, film, graphic design, fashion and jewelry design. Trained in film production, she maintains an open and evolving practice shaped by experimentation, collaboration, and project-based making. Her work does not follow a single fixed medium, but develops through different visual forms depending on the needs of each project.
She works closely with her mother, Josephine Turalba on a range of artistic research projects, contributing through visual development, photography, design, and production support. Alongside this collaborative work, her current independent research focuses on nightlife, urban youth culture, and gendered spectatorship in Poblacion, Makati, explored through photography and curatorial research toward a future photobook. Her Master’s dissertation examined Philippine film distribution infrastructure and questions of national identity in cinema, reflecting a broader investment in the future of the local film industry.
Ari Turalba is an emerging interdisciplinary artist whose work moves across photography, film, graphic design, fashion and jewelry design. Trained in film production, she maintains an open and evolving practice shaped by experimentation, collaboration, and project-based making. Her work does not follow a single fixed medium, but develops through different visual forms depending on the needs of each project.
She works closely with her mother, Josephine Turalba on a range of artistic research projects, contributing through visual development, photography, design, and production support. Alongside this collaborative work, her current independent research focuses on nightlife, urban youth culture, and gendered spectatorship in Poblacion, Makati, explored through photography and curatorial research toward a future photobook. Her Master’s dissertation examined Philippine film distribution infrastructure and questions of national identity in cinema, reflecting a broader investment in the future of the local film industry.