Goldfish, in collaboration with Simon Grefiel, 30:00, 2020
Goldfish is a meditation on the intersections, parallels, and cycles of colonial violence and natural catastrophes. The work primarily focuses on a monument created by Anastacio Caedo in MacArthur Leyte Landing Memorial National Park in Tacloban City where it commemorates the return of General Douglas MacArthur. His supposed return was monumentalized as a symbol of the American liberation of the Philippines against the Japanese occupation during World War II.
Shot in 2017 five years after the super typhoon Haiyan (also known in the Philippines as Yolanda) passed through the region, affecting 11 million people and taking 6,300 lives. Goldfish documents the reconstruction of the MacArthur monument after the hurricane and the peripheral activities occurring around it. The ambient sound of birds and dogs embedded in the video was recorded the 1st week of the COVID lockdown in Quezon City, Philippines in March of 2020.
In this iteration of the video, Vancouver-based artist Simon Grefiel narrates personal stories in Waray (a local dialect in the Eastern Visayan region where Tacloban City is located) based on his family’s accounts of living and experiencing Tacloban city. Grefiel who is also an immigrant and diasporic artist from the Philippines examines the discrepancies of cultural loss and retrieval through storytelling, translation and Visayan folklore.
Goldfish was produced in collaboration with Simon Grefiel, with sound engineering by Dana Qaddah.
Commissioned by Gallery TPW
October 3 – November 14, 2020
Curated by Noa Bronstein