III
Sites of Departure
Sites of Departure
- In each of these instances, the record becomes a site from which understanding can emerge. As clear or convoluted as its connection to “truth” may be, it stands as a threshold into a larger system of occurrences—a point of departure from which we can begin to untangle, or at the very least, follow its threads. Narratives which unfurl a tapestry of social, political, and material histories full of rich through-lines, unbalanced weaves, and frayed edges.
- In the early 1930s, Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's fascist regime, penned a collection of essays on history, philosophy, culture, and politics from his cell. Positioned from within the particular historical violence of his own moment, Gramsci argued that each of us carries within us an infinity of traces. The accumulated deposits of personal, familial, cultural, and political histories—an accumulation that exists without an orderly guide.
- “The starting point of critical elaboration,” he wrote, “is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’1 as a product of the historical process to date…” For Gramsci, to know yourself as a product of history, and to trace the deposits that shaped your understanding, was the precondition for any coherent thought or action. Without such an inventory, we remain what he called “walking anachronisms,” living in the present, with modes of thinking elaborated from a past we have yet to examine.
- Decades later, Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said would expand this idea, threading Gramsci's inventory through his own experience of displacement. The task of the inventory, Said argued, was not simply self-knowledge, but rather a relational understanding: to understand yourself in terms of others, and others as you would understand yourself. “Survival in fact,” he wrote, “is about the connections between things.” An entanglement, Said insisted, that if engaged beyond our traditional typological organization of peoples and cultures might offer a way into this relational understanding. “No one today is purely one thing. Labels...are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind.”
- Brought together, Gramsci and Said suggest that the record exists not just in the institution or archive, but crucially, in the body itself: in the accumulated traces that history has deposited in each of us, waiting to be named. In this accumulation, layered, entangled, and unorganized, I began to find the movement of the Oxbow a particularly useful metaphor.
- Beyond the simple association of the passage of time, the Oxbow described a mechanism of how things came to be, and where they might lead in the future. Beginning as a small curve in a river's path, the Oxbow forms through compounding actions of erosion and deposit. Water wearing away the outside edge of a bend while laying sediment on the inside, gradually amplifying the curve until the river shortcuts its former path entirely, leaving behind an isolated pool. What was once the main current becomes still water. A remnant of the river's history, no longer part of its flow, but enshrined just beyond where time has moved its current path.
- In many ways, this is also how knowledge consolidates. The same forces that shape a new channel—the slow accumulation of evidence, the gradual naturalization of one narrative over anothers—produce a dominant record that presents itself as the inevitable path. And in its wake, the oxbow lakes remain. The histories that were shortcut: not erased but bypassed, still full and real, no longer connected to our central stream of understanding and requiring some shift in perspective to become visible. A shift that begins with the body, the intimate.
- The stones underfoot on the banks of the Willamette carry a different kind of knowledge than the satellite image overhead, but not a lesser one. The scar above a lover's eye carries as much historical truth as the geological survey. The food a mother cooked, the seasonal memory of land, the knowledge passed through oral tradition, not approximations of understanding waiting to be validated by the institutional record, but rather understanding itself. Accumulated in bodies over time, shaped by direct experience and inherited memory, they constitute a form of knowing that the official record has largely never been calibrated to hold.
- This conversation with the shortcomings of knowledge produced by institutional archives has been central to the decolonial investigations and efforts of many writers, critical thinkers, and artists alike.
- Among them, the American academic and writer Saidiya Hartman, who has engaged the task of working “with and against the archive,” straining against its limits to recover what it buried, while acknowledging the impossibility of ever fully doing so. Her method, which she calls critical fabulation, navigates the threshold between what the historical record preserves and what it destroys, imagining into the silence where documentation runs out entirely. A gap, she argues, that is not an obstacle to overcome but a condition to be worked within.
- Where Hartman works primarily with subjects of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, whose existence appears only in the ledgers and legal documents of those who enslaved them—my practice more often encounters traces the institutional record chose not to recognize: the oral histories of Lippitt Hill, a historically Black neighborhood erased by urban renewal in 1959, or the migration story of my grandfather, a Filipino sugar plantation laborer whose passage to Hawaiʻi is recorded only in the ledgers of the colonial economy that brought him there. As a result, my task and approach is more one of contextualization and publication than of imagination: returning to sites where these traces accumulate, asking what might be revealed when the instruments of the dominant record are set aside, or information is added to its margins. Such traces often reveal themselves in discrete detail—whether the result of intentional political intervention, or the historical tendency to homogenize the intimate into flattened understanding, these distinct sites represent a threshold into more complex narratives and wider systems of occurrence.
The Greek motto gnōthi sauton (know thyself, nosce te ipsum) combines with the image of a skeleton to convey the famous warning: Respice post te; hominem te esse memento; memento mori. (Look behind; remember that you are mortal; remember death.)
- On the surface, they held an objective record of truth. Their medium reflecting the time of their production, their content an artifact. But as I began to explore these artifacts, to understand their organization and meaning, I zoomed out. The images themselves were only part of the story. A stereoscopic photograph of Palestine didn't just show a place—it showed who was selling that place, to whom, and why. The archive it sat in, the library that housed it, the university who laid claim to the building and the land upon which the institution sat—each layer was shaped by power and time, each deserving of the same scrutiny I'd been applying to the images themselves.
- These interconnected systems fascinated me, and looked vaguely familiar to the world I regularly engaged with as a commercial brand designer. The operation of systematic thinking: understanding the proliferation of a single decision into wider contexts. A relational understanding of product hierarchies, graphics and culture lifted from graphic design's traditional relation to the market, employed to uncover and communicate the threads existing between cultures, time, and experiential scales. Through practice, these sites began to organize themselves around three distinct but overlapping elements, each one a different angle of entry into the same story:
1. The Document: a marker in time, the artifact which orients.-
2. The Setting: The location (physical, ideological, or even speculative) from which the story originates.
3. The System: The interconnected structures of power and ideology that produce our reality.
- What emerged was less a system than a landscape, each project finding its position on a quadrant graph between the global and the intimate, the coded past and the sensory present. With The Site as the point of departure, a story could spread across the full field, or linger in a particular area, to reveal something beyond our initial comprehension
from 1985 thru 2013. (Image credit: Z. Sylvester/Geolounge; research credit: Z. Sylvester;
via Landsat)
The Document:
A marker in time, the artifact which orients.
Film stills from project whose lens? which begins its narrative from
The Document, expanding outward to explore themes of Orientalism and authorship
in media.
The image shows a crop of the British Imperial Federation Map:
Showing the Extent of the British Empire in 1886, and a composite image of a stereoscopic photograph from the collection Palestine paired with text from the accompanying book, Traveling In The Holy Land Through the Stereoscope.
The Setting:
The location (physical, ideological, or even speculative)
from which the story originates.
Selected images from What Happened to Hawaiʻi which begins from discrete childhood memories of the Hawaiian islands, zooming out to explore the colonial history that continues to shape place and culture today.
The image shows the slogan and layout from Defend O'ahu Coalition's "Keep The Country Country!" Campaign, aimed at protecting Oahu's north shore from large scale development, alongside a page clipping from The Hawaiian Pineapple Company's promotional book, The Kingdom That Grew Out of a Little Boy's Garden, by Marion Mason Hale ca. 1927.
The System:
The interconnected structures of power and ideology
that produce our reality.
Selected spread from Mass Media which explores how media and commercial interests have shaped the American relationship with guns and gun violence in
the post-Columbine era.
The image shows a screengrab from CNN's coverage of
the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, FL. Feb. 14, 2018
and a screengrab from CNN's coverage of the Sandy Hook Elementary School
shooting in Newtown, CT. Dec. 14, 2012.
- Placed against the task of building a relational inventory, this organization offered various levels of clarity in how one might trace the intricate weaves that exist across the tapestry of human experience. But as I continued to work, the limits of any single vantage point became harder to ignore. Every story I entered contained more story, every edge I traced revealed another edge beyond it.
- Returning to Mandelbrot and his question of the British coastline however, the lesson was not that measurement is futile but that resolution is always a choice. A choice that determines what becomes visible and what remains outside the frame. Totality was never the point. The question was always which resolution to work at, and what that choice would reveal and foreclose.
- This is the gap at the center of my practice: between what is held as evidence and what actually constitutes knowing. Every archive is also an argument about what counts. Of the infinite traces around us, only some become markers; those which we recognize, point toward, and decide matter. The institutional record selects and circulates these markers while others remain outside its threshold of legibility, accessible only through deeper investigation. Yet the record need not be limited to what institutions preserve. My practice is rooted in the belief that memory, accumulation, and testimony—whether embodied, domestic, or oral—constitute equally valid forms of recording and knowing.
- To work within this gap is to confront the politics of telling and retelling: Who gets to enter the site? Whose account is legible as evidence? Who controls access to what is archived, and who has historically been kept from it?
- Algerian-Palestinian Jewish author and theorist, Ariella Azoulay, addresses many of these questions directly by reframing our relationship with the image itself. In her book, The Civil Contract of Photography, she argues that every photograph is not a record but a relation. A three-way negotiation between photographer, photographed subject, and spectator, each of whom carries different claims on what the image means and who it serves. The photograph, she insists, belongs to no single author and no single narrative, exceeding any presumption of ownership. To look at a photograph is already a civic act, one that implicates the viewer in the conditions under which the image was made. Expanded beyond the image, the same is true of every medium, each encoding its own terms and implications.
- As such, my practice moves fluidly between mediums—film, books, postcards, posters, wall-hung pieces—as a deliberate investigation of how form shapes access and meaning within narrative. A film commands different attention than a book you hold in your hands, which differs still from a poster that arrests you mid-stride. Each medium carries its own power dynamics about who gets to look, and how; its own resolution and threshold of legibility. By working across these formats, I'm able to activate different relationships between the document, the setting, and the system, choosing the form that best troubles or illuminates the particular story I'm investigating.
the specific temporal and atmospheric requirements of the medium.
- In What Happened to Hawaiʻi, a collection of postcards makes you complicit in the sorting of colonial history through form which perpetuates its fantasy. In 3000ft/s, two light boards visualize the speed of an assault rifle round, against the backdrops of everyday American life. Form both as invitation to reflect, and as demand to reckon.
- But the power of form to implicate, to confront, to demand, raises its own questions. Every act of documentation is also an act of claim-making. To enter a history, to decide what deserves to be recorded and how it should be encountered, is to assert some authority over it, an assertion that requires scrutiny. Whose history is it? What do I risk reproducing in the act of telling it? Questions that evade clean answers, and ones I continue to weigh as I develop my practice.
- In making these choices, and sitting with these questions, I find myself turning to familiar company. Thomas Cole with his palette and canvas, Hitchcock with his geological instruments in one hand and scripture in the other. Both were working at the edge of what their moment allowed them to see, not dishonestly, but partially. Their records were shaped not just by what stood before them, but by the full weight of what they carried to the riverbank. Their blind spots weren't failures of intelligence, but rather the inevitable consequence of working from somewhere specific, with tools built for a particular kind of seeing—a condition I also exist within.
- My practice is shaped by my own accumulated traces: A Filipino-American designer, trained in commercial aesthetics, drawn to the histories that institutional records passed over, arriving at each site with inherited instruments I'm still learning to deploy. The work, then, is to be honest from where I stand. To make the inventory as carefully as possible, knowing it will always be incomplete. To choose resolutions that reveal what the dominant record obscures, while acknowledging that my own instruments have their own thresholds, their own blind spots, their own oxbow lakes waiting just beyond the frame. That is what the work is for, not to resolve these questions but to keep them open, and to invite others into the asking.
- Through this work, I position myself not as an authority, but as an active participant in collective memory-making. A documentarian with a designer's toolkit, an entity that remembers. My work stands not as a beacon of truth, but an earmarked page in the ongoing book humanity is writing. The work is a reflection of my person, containing my interests and perspective, my strengths and shortsightedness. It offers one side of an unfolding conversation, ready to sit down with the generations that follow.
Screengrab from Policy Clock shows a snippet from Project 2025's leadership document. (top) A 3D render shows the proposed installation of 3000ft/s on a high school football field. (middle) Selected postcard from What Happened to Hawaiʻi shows workers harvesting pineapple. (bottom)
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Collected Projects
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Collected Projects