americana

These landscapes were taken on a roadtrip through the American West that my Filipina mother invited herself on. For two weeks, she witnessed my compulsive pursuit of light. I do not know what she made of it as we embarked on underplanned adventures on unpaved roads, as I dragged large and medium format cameras down dusty trails and developed sheet film in tiny cabin bathrooms. I do know that I am my mother’s nightmare (an aging, childless, unmarried, queer, mentally ill artist!) and to talk about my mother is to pick at fresh stitches over an old wound. So instead of talking about my mother, I go to the lab and process the negatives, captured in full color and painful detail. I scan the film, I recast the memories warmer, bolder, clearer than the original scene. I make use of whatever I caught, whatever came out - dodging shadows, burning in the highlights, romanticizing the light leaks as some kind of divine intervention and physically grieving what is still too hard to say with words.

My parents left the Philippines near the end of the Marcos regime, to work for a better life. What I did with their sacrifices is not what they had in mind, but to talk about my mother is to talk about a lineage of sacrificial daughters inheriting the same burdens and expectations she passed down to me. As an Amerikana, I grew up in the land of opportunity and I was promised the right to be myself, so I am. There’s no way to tell my mother what I can’t even articulate, but I can drive her through the vistas and valleys of this wild land and maybe through the miles travelled, we’ll eventually understand each other better.

— Twyla Sampaco