Drifting Threads and Topographies

Drifting Threads and Topographies is a site-responsive installation of ten embroidered piña-silk panels suspended in a former classroom in Nakanojo. Conceived after a residency in the town, the work reflects on the lingering textures of its textile-making past and the stillness of its mountain setting. Delicate and translucent, the panels shift with passing air—stirred by breath, body, or breeze—transforming stillness into a quiet tide. As visitors move among them, they redirect airflow perceptible only in the cloth’s slow sway, echoing the installation’s submerged sonic layer in a quiet choreography of presence.

Produced with weavers in Lumban and Aklan along with embroiderers in Taal, the panels link two Philippine sites shaped by water and craft. Piña and silk fibers are blended through traditional methods, while embroidery becomes a way of sensing—each thread tracing submerged histories and speculative futures. Taal’s sealed waterway, once a vital passage, resonates with Nakanojo’s quiet terrain, situating the work within a broader aquatic imaginary tied to the Indo-Pacific: a corridor marked by movement, precarity, and entangled memory.

The classroom becomes not a site of instruction but of attunement—its silence animated by cloth and current. Here, textile and water act not as passive materials but as agents shaping atmosphere and guiding presence. Imagined beings—the nomads of the abyss—drift through the installation as counter-technologies: drifting instead of fixing, listening instead of scanning. Drifting Threads and Topographies does not chart new territory but traces what persists across islands, myths, and thresholds: motion without mastery, presence without permanence