Marisa Gallemit
Ontario
Marisa Gallemit, Winnipeg Pag Ibig, performance video, wheat pasting.
Working across disciplines, Marisa Gallemit traces fragmented chronicles of migration, often incorporating objects and rites from “back home” in her artwork to ask questions about acculturation, community-building and third culture futurity.
For STAGES, Gallemit foregrounds lampaso bunot, an old-fashioned practice in the Philippines of polishing wooden floors with an unhusked coconut shell underfoot.
Gallemit performs lampaso at three separate locations in the city, significant as loci of employment for Filipino immigrants since the 1960s and into present day, making Winnipeg home to the largest Filipino population per capita in Canada.
Documenting the repeated action at Saint Boniface Hospital and at two factories in The Exchange, she commemorates the invisible labour of generations of Filipinos who leave their home country to work as nurses, garment workers and domestic caregivers abroad.
The ritual of cleaning is an act of service, an acknowledgement of their effort as well as a recognition of the courage required to commit to dwelling in place on Treaty One territory. It also interrogates the kind of work that is valorized and our hazy notions of security, success and evolution.
Summoning the pre-colonial Filipino concept of Kapwa (interconnectivity or togetherness), Gallemit invited fellow Filipino Canadian artists to collaborate in the making of Winnipeg Pag Ibig. Charles Romero Venzon, Nathan Flores, Karen Remoto and Trae Gallemit-Fraser are second and third generation Filipinos based in Winnipeg and Tkaronto.
The final form of Winnipeg Pag Ibig manifests in the temporary projection of the performance film onto the wall of an industrial factory site and printed stills wheat pasted in public areas across the city.
Marisa Gallemit is a visual artist living on the traditional unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. Through sculpture, assemblage, wearable artworks and site-specific installation, her practice explores repurposed materials and their potential energy, producing tactile monuments to our collective and subtle encounters with human and more-than-human kin.
Motivated by the concept that every object carries its own history and vigour, Gallemit collaborates with found entities and discarded artifacts–favoured as much for their visual markings of time and wear as for their emblematic significance–and activates them as fossils from a particular time/space or as souvenirs of an emotionally-charged lived experience. Old things tell stories.
Informed by motherhood and Filipinx third-culture rituals, Gallemit investigates the odyssey of identity, heritage, and kapwa, the indigenous Filipino ideology of interconnectedness, interdependence and intersubjectivity. Every project leans deeply into Buckminster Fuller’s query: “Now, how do we make this spaceship work?”
Location: 376 Donald St.
Hours: 24 hour access
Acknowledgments
We are on Treaty 1 Territory. Plug In ICA is located on the territories of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation.
Plug In ICA extends our heartfelt gratitude to our generous donors, valued members, and dedicated volunteers. We acknowledge the sustaining support of our Director’s Circle. You all make a difference.
The artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council, the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. We could not operate without their continued financial investment and lobbying efforts.
Plug In ICA relies on community support to remain free and accessible to all, and enable us to continue to present excellent programs. Please consider becoming a member of Plug In ICA and a donor at https://plugin.org/support or by contacting Caitlin at caitlin@plugin.org.
For more information on public programming and exhibitions contact Allison Yearwood at allison@plugin.org.
For general information, please contact: info@plugin.org or call 1.204.942.1043