Inertia Fotos

March, 2020

First week of announced social distancing and groceries. The line to the grocery was a 45 minute wait. Everyone compulsively purchased in bulk,  including myself. Lines were long. I wondered if this exposed my ego: purchasing in bulk due to fear of scarcity. Making sure that I have everything and more for myself and my mate. How selfish. 

Before the pandemic, I spent at most $40 a week on groceries only purchasing what I knew would be consumed and was needed. 

I didn't feel morally aligned after shopping. I drove home feeling compromised. I was not taking the virus very seriously and felt foolish for buying so much food. 

April 1, 2020 

I was wandering about my mate's apartment, filming corners of the space to look for something new: something foreign in someone else's home. Before the pandemic, I had recently changed numbers to estrange myself from my father to alleviate my ptsd and to cut ties with my ex-partner. 

I was planning to leave to Germany in June for the summer to escape patterns and this exhausted concept of "home".  I loved who I was while travelling into the unknown.

In the those times, I had to find a home within myself in the most unfamiliar places. 

Many claim that others persistently travel to escape their troubles, or  "to find themselves" , but I feel that some travel to separate their identity from concepts that they've been routinely fostered with. 

Change strengthens the core of the being, is what I believe. 

Now, here I am. Behind two-folds of walls.  

April 5, 2020

The old couple next door are refurbishing an old Piedmont home: the building is a remnant of the 1970's. The wife will tend to the garden, sweeping the dead leaves off the stone walkway and quaint fountain centered at its path while the husband maintains the building. Anytime after it would rain, the old man would painstakingly mop the roof by hand with a rag. The same puddles always form in the same spots.  

The rent is probably at a Californian standard. 

Times are changing but I don't think it's for the better. From the surface, it all seems progressive. 

It's a type of progressive that is uniquely American: taking an old system from the time before, refurbishing it, redistributing it, and renaming it.

But the same puddles form in the same dips. 

April 14, 2020

For dinner, we had pasta. Generally, with sauteed vegetables paired with mason jars of water. We'd usually dine over the coffee table, edged on the couch with our elbows to our knees. Sometimes, it would be quiet and other times, I'd insist on a show because I had nothing else to say. Despite having been together 24/7, I still felt inclined to ask, "How was your day?" Even more so than before. 

I remember the times I'd ask when he'd pick me up from work. It was like a line from a script. 

At this point, I was asking because I really wanted to know:

How are you? How are you feeling having spent so much time inside? With work? With me? With yourself? 

He'd respond with, "Work was ok. Not too busy."

I'd quietly eat not really knowing what to say. 

Then, we'd watch "Seinfeld".

These pretzels are making me thirsty. 

April 18, 2020

I started cutting my own hair sometime in 2018. I wanted to become as self-sufficient as possible in all areas of my life, starting with hair cuts. I became a devoted minimalist. 

I've found it easier to reduce material attachments from my life. I already have the emotional weight of my past so why carry the burdens of things and activities that provide no insight to my questions? 

I wanted to empty myself. Become hollow. Concave. Who am I really without these material things? These symbols and signifiers? 

Am I really who I say I am when no one is looking?

So I keep carving myself out, looking, searching, for that backbone. 

April 22, 2020

In photography, there is the camera, object, and subject. The object is manipulated into a subject that derives its existence from the photographer. The progression from object to subject is a delicate one. This is an innocent philosophy to entertain but once it involves people, it becomes dangerous because it requires the objectification of a person to reach subjectification. In photojournalism, the camera can become a weapon of narrative and misrepresentation. Regarding art photography, if a photographer cannot remove their ego from creative intention, they can incapacitate the model into a constant state of objectification without ever reaching subjectification.

Every shoot a model is hired for (having no creative control), the self is compromised to be manipulated from object to subject. The self is like a rubber band while the objectification and subjectification is the pulling and stretching. After some time, the self is elastic enough to return to its original shape but if this degradation occurs extensively, the self becomes inelastic: the rubber band will lose its original shape and eventually break. Some models are strong enough to persevere but due to systemic sexism and exploitation rooted into our society, not all prevail. Being a model risks the self becoming severely disintegrated from one’s core identity.

I’ve finally retired from professional freelance modeling at 25 years old. Since the age of 18, I’ve only seen my body as the object of an image: commodified, sexualized, digitized and reduced into a JPEG. My mind has alienated itself from the body in order to use it as an efficient transactional tool for survival.

The irony of becoming a freelance art model is the desire to escape the traditional American working-class by naively becoming the embodiment of consumerism within consumer society under the name of “art”: I became a sexual commodity within our digital age, coaxing market-like thinking with the glossy shell of “sexual-empowerment”.

To embrace capitalizing one’s sexuality as a form of sexual empowerment leads to an inorganic relationship with one’s sexual-identity, body and agency. It is a disillusion to believe that sexual freedom is obtained by reducing and utilizing one’s body into an economic mechanism. 

It prevents contemporary sexuality from flourishing in its sublimity: diverse, intricate, and beyond heteronormativity.

So, do I believe that my modeling had artistic integrity? Not at all, it was a facade I fell for. 

Frankly, I don’t know how to live with my body alone. Even during a pandemic, I obsess over my form being “good enough” to be commodifiable. My mind is so distorted that I am both obsessed and estranged from my own body: the estrangement stems from my body’s agency being compromised by traumatic events while the obsession is motivated by fear to survive. I no longer want to feel like my body is a stranger I feel sorry for. I want it to feel organic. Safe like home and soft like Earth’s soil. Still, I look at it through a lens like a spectator. Distorted and objectified.

May 6, 2020

I’ve been trying to imagine my life as a puzzle. Once I have the pieces together, it’ll make a defining picture that will finally explain why things happened the way they did. Was it supposed to teach me something? Did I deserve it? What is the narrative?

There is a picture but there’s no reason for it.

It is just a picture.

There is no objective reason for why history has played itself out the way it did.

I believed that the system could liberate me from the conditions of impoverishment but I’ve learned that you can never escape generational poverty. Empirically, you might but it remains pathological.

I religiously followed this ideology that being an American means having a chance.

I took this concept to be referential and literal, forgetting that ideologies are susceptible to representation and manipulation.

I’ve learned that the circumstances of being an American are realer than the American ideology of success itself. My circumstance is being a first-generation Filipina and Native American female navigating the dark waters of Americanism.

Marriage, success, and loyalty. I compromised my integrity attempting to achieve such things.

I lost myself believing those ideologies could humanize me when it has done the opposite: leaving me feeling less human without them.

I put the ideology before being the self when it should have been the self before the ideology.

That was my mistake.

To say, “I am a human” leaves me feeling more human than any title I could think of.

Suddenly, the picture makes sense. 

May 30, 2020 

Just a few days after George Floyd’s death, there followed protests all over the U.S. calling for justice and reform. Like a hive, helicopters swarmed downtown Oakland, attempting to illuminate their racist narrative of black folx terrorizing America in order to keep police brutality in the dark.

Cops are spineless. For all of June, America would sleep to the sounds of cops deploying grenades and gas onto peaceful protestors, followed with fireworks going off through the night.

The “Black Lives Matter” civil rights movement is no different than the civil rights movement that occurred in the 1950’s and 1960’s. History has an interesting way of exploiting time and designating varying levels of importance to the past, present and future. We speak of time in a historiographical perspective such as that time is linear and is a closed continuous progression towards the Supreme Good under the ruling class. American history has implicated this irrational belief that there was an appropriate time for events to have existed in human history, such as slavery, for example.

Americanism has been administered by the written history of the ruling class in order to enforce a political reality that is an ideological fantasy.

It’s 2020, and you wonder, “Why is this still happening?”

What we are experiencing are the fissures of history: the true physical reality is resurfacing between the cracks, bypassing the linear succession of the historical dimension as revolutions. It is as if the past jumped into the future or that the future jumped into the past proving that history is not linear and real. Civil rights movements are the symptom of the impossibility of an ideological fantasy of traditional, teleological American history.

Behind America’s veil of being a “melting pot” is its disgusting face that has aged from centuries of systemic racism and hate-mongering: its treatment towards black folx is shameful and inhumane. If only one could strangle it with its veil, tightly, until it choked from its slimy and decietful bloated tongue.

September, 2020 

The California fires seemed eternal. For the entire month, we remained indoors with our windows sealed. The air smelled awfully depressing in the sense that we were inhaling disaster everyday: destroyed communities, wildlife, lives, etc . For a week, I undermined the dangerous air quality and continued my morning runs. Soon, I began to develop chest pains within a week. 

The fires plagued all of California and Oregon. Sometime in October, we fled to Seattle for a breath of fresh air. I ran to my hearts content in Washington. I'll never forget how vivid the maple trees were up there. It was incredible: copper leaves shimmered and the sweet smell of Douglas fir trees filled the crisp air. The skies there were this muted pale blue: calm, cool and collected.  

When I was a kid, around this time, it would be raining and chilly as one would expect. I would wear uggs, a puffy Baby Phat jacket and a scarf to school everyday. I'm 26 years old now, in Oakland, wearing running shorts and a tanktop in December.

We've stretched our limited resources on this planet to a point of inelasticity. The worst has yet to come. The fires have been progressively getting worse for the past three years here. Our climate has me questioning if it is even responsible to bring a child into this world in our current state of affairs. Why would you? You'd literally be setting them up for disaster. 

September 2020

Around this time, I was running 20 miles a week. That morning, I felt anxious and decided to run 7 miles. I spaced out, lost focus, then tripped over buckled sidewalk, falling hard. I couldn’t get up: My right leg and hip was momentarily paralyzed. This would be the third time I’ve injured myself from running with the intent of “trying to clear my mind.”

Back in October 2019, I was run over by a distracted driver while biking to university. I lost a good chunk of my right kneecap: 4 inches wide 1 inch deep. I remember waking up to my bedroom ceiling after being hospitalized: My eyes welled with tears as I stared into the void, paralyzed from pain and fear. I have no family-- I recently escaped an abusive relationship and had just started over with only the clothes on my back, a bike, a laptop, a debit card and a new identity.

My knee was the size of a baseball and the rest of my body was badly injured. I was disabled and could only walk with a cane for three months. After retiring from 6 years of modeling, I took up a job at a bakery and started anew -- My ability to work, attend university, and sustain my fitness centered around cycling and running --- now what? For a couple of weeks, my friends had to help me use the restroom and strangers would often assume I was born with a disability. My sense of independence shattered.

I hated cleaning my wound. I’d bring myself to the bathtub with my cane, undress, trembling from imbalance --- I’d slide myself into the tub, run the hot water, then carefully unwrap the sticky bandages that pulled at fresh scar tissue. My legs were saturated in dark yellow, blue and purple bruises. My wound, a deep cut, revealed yellow, murky red, sometimes grey nodules of fatty tissue. The stitches barely held my swollen skin together.

As a former model, I have seen my body in tens of thousands of images but for the first time I was finally experiencing this body not as a commodified object, a “muse”, or .jpeg file, but really as my own. In that bathtub, I realized that my body feels pain to protect me: I’m not invincible and I am finite. I can die and will die. There’s something to be learned from the miseries of life, or really, the truth. I think it's about presence: to be present with your pain, your happiness, but most importantly, your pain and happiness and how the end can be a beginning and vice versa.

With presence, I believe it is like running a marathon: you can ignore the pain through the race to pass the finish line at a particular time, but once you cross, you’ll be left with the physical trauma of having possibly injured yourself during the chaotic sprint. If you address the pain or inconsistencies while running and become present in those breaths and steps, you can spare yourself the post-run trauma to enjoy and be present throughout and after the race. You’ll finish, as we all do, and I think the point of running a marathon is to say, “Yeah, I ran one.”

My knee has a deep, dark scar on it. I can’t kneel or bend on it for too long since the nerves are still healing. So, when I fell from running, my right leg was paralyzed for a couple of minutes. This nearby contractor saw me and quickly helped. Elijah then came and picked me up. They both carried me into the car: I was embarrassed. I angrily cried, shaking from pain, “I’m so fucking stupid! I’ve been doing so well! I fucked it up! I fucking hate myself!” Elijah tried to calm me down but I continued to punish myself and my body for reminding me: You can’t outrun yourself or your pain. It happened and all we can do is accept that it did.