Dr Marlo De Lara FRSA
RACE.ED Stuart Hall Foundation Fellow, March - December 2023
Home Institution: AMDA College and Conservatory of Performing Arts / Coaxial Arts Foundation
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, artist Marlo De Lara received a PhD in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and an MA in Psychosocial Studies at the Centre of Psychoanalytic Studies at Essex. Her practice works within the realms of sound performance, visual distraction, and film. Her textural compositions develop from microscopic tone landscapes into dense and expansive states of noise. Her works aim to blur the definitions of the (un)intentional and the myth of permanence. Using found objects, installation, and various forms of amplification, environments/structures use sound to impart meaning and affect for the participant. As the child of Philippine migrants of the ‘brain drain’ coming of age, De Lara’s unabashed feminist sociopolitical practice/research editorializes on contemporary global conditions. Her investigations on art collectives and creative work as political action fuels Ladyz in Noyz, an international arts collective that promotes emerging artists/musicians who are women. Her research relates to feminism, representation of marginalized populations particularly within sound and music, and creative work as political action and she provides workshops relating to sound practices and hardware, DIY collectives, and narratives as creatively productive political possibility.
Project title: Displanting Routes: Sounding Philippine Diasporas
The project seeks to foreground the continuing connections between diaspora and coloniality, by bringing into view less discussed accounts of what the colonization and occupation of the Philippines. The histories of the Asian archipelago are not of one but many peoples with hundreds of islands that were erased by conquest and then assembled into a previously non-existent single nation. Where then is the Philippine diasporic location today, and where does it feature in the lexicon of current cultural identification that has extended beyond the homeland to those who migrate to other countries? Philippine diasporic location today is mid-transit in that it includes a somewhat tenuous and unclear cultural subjectivity. The reasons are intimately connected with how the islands were desecrated, and the land divorced from the peoples with the displacement of enslaved indigenous bodies as labour for the colonial powers. A diasporic conundrum applies to Philippine populations living abroad, a condition emblematic of postimperial transnational cultures that goes beyond previous normative Western monolithic understandings of “exotic” cultures.
Using an ahistorical form, I will sound Filipinx diasporic identities aurally. In other words, if we were to solely listen, what knowledge could be gained about this culture and how is what is not heard meaningful? By creating a small archive of recorded interviews, field recordings, and poetry/spoken word works from Filipinx diaspora, these cultural productions disarticulate the previous colonial/imperial frameworks. As a sound performance artist/writer/thinker, I am intrigued by the pathways and methods of transport that led the multiple peoples to new homes. The sounds of the everyday show the dynamism of lived experience of multiple bodies of multiple generations. Therefore, by actively recording some of these sounds, I become part of the work, mediating present time. I will assemble a bricolage from the research archive to create a listening experience speaking towards the current Philippine diasporic cultural subjectivity.