I spent a lot of time thinking about how my whole life has been about proving people wrong. I am not the type of person that people hold faith in, not since I was a child, nor in recent times. If there’s something that will mark 24 to me, it might be how mundane this casual cruelty has become to me: being completely unable to receive any type of sympathy, waking up with dread every single day, my hair falling out in clumps, proving myself in mundane tests, failing people who have been generous. Maybe this is the most crushing thing outside of the material cost of the world; I think it’s why I’ve grown particularly withdrawn, skeptical, and distrusting of people over the years. I don’t think my goal is to be that type of person (a subject worthy of belief)… but I’d like to be a believer. Not necessarily the type of belief that destroys the shell that I’ve rightfully drawn, but one that far deeper.
If there is anything I’d like to hold close this upcoming year, it is to be more faithful in all around me—perhaps so much so that it might be misconstrued as delusion. Yes—I’d like to be faithful.
24 felt like decades, but also strangely stagnant. I was thrusted into work with more agency, traveled more than I have in a long while (not truly for leisure–with the way my life is going, I don’t think I’ll have a real vacation until I’m 28), stretched my body with performances… defined more what I was walking towards. A few months ago, I was home again to show KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN at Art Fair, but I felt a bit sick coming back—like I had failed. It’s been strange and sinking ever since. At the same time, I’ve spent countless nights sick, delirious, loving the work, wanting to be excellent, believing in myself when no one else would… like this was knowing the world, and no one would take it away from me. Then, there were the few precious times also, where I could sit slowly with myself, and hear things pristinely, clearly; understand the smallness of my body but the wholeness of all I could have.
Less things matter; the few that do appear larger than life. I just had the biggest product release of my life (we launched Figma Sites, but still have much more to do)—I think it’s something I’ll look back at when I grow old, and see that I tried. I took a few days to breathe before throwing over a hundred sketches from the past year into a new work to screen at Tate on the 16th, and hope I get more time to build things that shape up to the thoughts and heart I have. Farther ahead? I’d like to get Developh to a meaningful place, start explorations for a potential company (!), continue developing my art practice with intensity & rigor to have a body of work, research, and thought to culminate in an exhibition (!!!!), be an excellent & sharp designer that knows what it takes to grow, handle some logistical woes with Visa/immigration status that have inhibited me for a few years, and continue with voracious, unfettered belief…
From the pisonet, the aircon, the data center, to the POGO
In the archipelago, technology swells at every extreme. All matters are now in service of machines: land, sea, body, mind. The Filipino is a weather machine.
There’s a video of a computer shop in Cainta, Philippines where the floodwaters go up to the thighs. The boys have their headphones on, their polyester shorts hiked up, still playing Crossfire. Empty chairs and wrappers float up, and power cables run from the top of the room (precautions from previous storms). We know all the storms by name. We play with our lives. This is the image of the tropical technologist.
If technology is largely characterized by human manipulation of the environment to its ends, then the archipelago’s struggle with technology is one of constant weathering. Air conditioners relentlessly whirr in attempts to regulate heat, winds signal us to shelter, and satellites patternize all beyond our control. At times, nature attempts to reclaim itself, standing against all we’ve done to contain it. We respond in turn: more wires, infrastructural messes, generators, messes our bodies together. Much of nature’s wrath is just natural consequence. Rapid industrialization and urbanization irreversibly alter climate, unruly disaster predictions understate chaos, it rains inside data centers. Environmental inputs don’t just provide suggestions for sustainability, but become the mediators of their possibility. Our command of technologies is inseparable from the climates that it emerges from and is used within: so much that the elemental embodies the technological, and the technological constructs the elemental.
Third world technologies present alternative imaginaries for environmental computing that reject utopian visions of control. A tropical technologist embraces intermittency, seasonality, and scale, acting as a steward of land and machine. Living between extremes of dry and wet, blackouts and fragmentation shutter our attempts to control the weather—we merely adapt, memorize, survive. Ecologies are read as cybernetic systems; all environmental instability merely responds to human attempts to reign over it. “The earth is a machine of variation,” describes new media theorist Jussi Parikka. To borrow from the land of excess and leftovers, we’ll look over studies of technologies at different scales—examining how the tropical technologist might navigate, establish, defy, reinvent, and be imprisoned by the ever-blurring lines of atmosphere and machine in the age of the anthropocene.
THE PISONET
For people in the peripheries, life is lived in bundles of small plastic packets. Shampoo, coffee, seasoning, and toothpaste hang across the beams of neighborhood stores, often purchased by the many who do not have disposable income to buy more than sample-size goods. We drink small pours of soda in plastic bags, wash the bags clean and store it in a plastic bag of plastic bags. These same sundries sell prepaid load cards for mobile data for as low as US$2, connectivity in fragments. Tiny mountains of the rubbish of our lives pile up in street corners, shining in every color.
The third world sachet economy extends to the technologies we use, perhaps best exemplified by the pisonet machines that arose in the late 2000s. Pisonets (piso internet) are coin operated computers encased in wooden arcade machines, vending minutes of internet use for as little as PHP1 (US$0.020). They function as an even more restrictive & incremental alternative to computer shops (which also offer timed access), set up by local entrepreneurs in provincial and slum areas where many lack their own machines or where cellular connectivity is too poor. (In the Asia-Pacific, Filipinos have the highest time spent on the internet, some of the more expensive rates, and the slowest internet connection speeds.) Other alternatives have emerged: there is also the more miniature piso wifi, another connectivity vendo that provides internet access (no machine), in case you have your own phone.
While the western world enjoys ubiquity and speed, the tropical technologist faces exorbitant costs and connectivity issues, assuming they are able to be welcomed into the network at all. Because of this infrastructural poor, we find inventive yet capital-driven solutions to connect to the rest of the world with internet offered in sachets. Across the archipelago, the pisonet attests to the fragmentation of access itself.
Recent years of record heat have caused unprecedented power calamities. El Niño’s1 heatwaves stress Manila’s centralized power grids as fans and air conditioners blast and hydroelectric supplies damper. In May 2024, at least 23 power plants across Luzon went out. Governments begged for the public to minimize use as the heat index soared to up to 46°C.
Pisonet owners begin to find inventive solutions: after all, the machine itself contests the fragmentation of our archipelago. Low-cost solar setups arose as popular add-ons, plopped on top of corroding aluminum roofing, helping offset exorbitant electrical costs while guarding against power outages. We make our own distributed grids, find localized ways of living amidst crises. Boys continue to play through the storms.
Reductionist views of the tropics might associate it with dysfunction, (urban) jungles—a backwards world. We are a proper poor, where lights flicker and we boil water in kettles for hot baths. An island atop of fault lines always on the verge of an end. While the other side of the globe might enjoy increasing efficiency that in turn, leads to continued extraction—simply hungering for more and more. Compute is the new oil, after all. But there is something beautiful about the necessary roughness of scarcity: we reject ubiquity and everywhere-ness, we use only what is needed (because that is all we have), the slowness of our infrastructure actually present the truest mode of sustainability beyond the harnessing of the sun: simply needing less.
But in the tropics, bodies and time are slow. We watch over each other’s shoulders, heckling one another in cramped spaces and alleyways. Access is precious—so we inherently adopt a kind of intentionality with technology that times itself with natural resources. Bandwidth limitations further aid this sometimes unintentional sustainability: we load low-resolution images from off-market phones (if they load at all), stream in 240P, live with throttled download speeds, and sometimes can’t access more than a handful of sites at all.2 The computer is only ‘on’ when the sun is, not by choice but by circumstance. We are intermittent, islanded, and deeply intimate with the limitations of the land, as fluid as water.
Where the pisonet suggests we might embrace intermittency and move towards slowness, the air conditioner presents a climate paradox. What if the technologies we’ve relied on to survive are the very cause of our suffocation?
The modern air conditioner was invented in Buffalo, New York in 1902 to help regulate humidity in a publishing house. It spread to flour mills and Gillette factories, devised for industrial productivity & quality, with the tolerable temperatures for laborers being a mere side effect. It was re-explored for comfort reasons a few years later 1906: theaters often shut down in the summer due to the heat, but the air conditioner could change this. So led to the rise of the summer blockbuster and the shopping mall.
Later, on the other side of the world, the Crystal Arcade of Escolta, Manila opens in 1932—the Philippines’ first air-conditioned shopping mall. It is destroyed in World War II.
Under brutal temperatures, Filipinos flock to malls for their conditioned atmospheres. Within, everything is controlled, it’s not just the weather: every service imaginable at every price range advertised, where a nation’s urban sprawl has delegated it as the public space, a proxy for parks, the beacon of modernity—clean and cold, the opposite of the city. Metro Manila has 317 hectares of urban parks and 368 hectares of retail space occupied by the top ten major shopping centers alone. The mall is the city itself. Public transportation routes go through Mall A to Mall B. I went to church inside a shopping mall.
It is no surprise that the American mall is at its deathbed while the Philippine supermall thrives. Here is the tropical climate crisis, there is no pisoweather and only the big players can talk. Microcontrol of the weather at the expense of the macroclimate, where Western stores and mass profiteers control the flow of our bodies in exchange for our purchasing and servicing. In the summers, malls experiment with cutting wifi and AC to avoid immense crowds. Malls and air conditioners become extensions of colonial control.
Erik de Castro/Reuters
How much of this is to blame from centuries of western shaping? Malls, capital, waste, and excess. Stores are lined with western brands, we follow western trends, speak in English and make our voices sound neat. Upper class Filipino culture is mocked for their reliance on air conditioning: from their air conditioned homes they step into air conditioned vans and then get dropped off right in front of air conditioned malls — sun-kissed skin and sweat are symbols for poor, for lack. We once roamed the seas.
The Philippines is no stranger to colonial technologies: karaoke from the Japanese provides moments of solace, bahay na bato (stone houses) from the Spanish style most ancestral houses, and jeepneys from refurbished American military vehicles have become a reclaimed national symbol. Today, the American air conditioner is a new colonialism: our reckless attempts to control the weather driven from capital, and the long-term climate collapse that comes after. Cooling, an invented privilege, becomes an inescapable cage of our masking, dotting skylines with wires and mess.
Powerlines in the Philippines
There are limitations to blaming the individual consumer, even if it’s a favorite option. All these issues stem from systems and scales larger than what we can comprehend. We feed from plastic because we have no choice; the sachet economy is a result of corporate greed. How are we to blame the vulnerable and elderly for a reliance on cooling when the heat kills? First world countries import their waste to the third world, with the United States exported 276,200 shipping containers worth of waste to developing nations in 2017. In the gated suburbs, there is one air conditioner turned on in the whole house, and a family of four all sleeping together in the same bed. The subtle drone in the air is the ambience of upper middle-class Manila. There is a network that is always on elsewhere, drawing computational power from the many hungry.
THE DATA CENTER
If the urban tropic is characterized by its entanglement with the colonial project of malls and the consequences of air conditioning, the rural tropic faces its industrial equivalent with the data center. As digital infrastructure demands physical space, we continue to create artificial environments. Still, we face a real reality: our lands are turning into clouds.
50 MW capacity VITRO Sta Rosa opened its doors in July 2024, boasted as “the nation’s first true hyperscale data center.” Data centers offer centralized solutions to computational power, storage, hosting, backups, and other technical needs at continental scales. VITRO aims to attract foreign investments, servicing tech megacorporations and other Asia-Pacific players, even amidst infrastructural challenges in an already resource-stressed archipelago. The same month, Typhoon Carina batters the country. Floods lead to surging power demands, the island’s power grid goes on yellow alert, with 300,000+ homes losing power.
Telecommunications giant (and monopolist) PLDT has been in the data center game since 2000, but in recent years, demand has soared. The company’s data center capacity was at about 146.2 MW in August 2024, but PLDT is already eyeing its next and 12th one, dreaming of twice the capacity. New facilities seeking to cater to AI’s needs, which have even higher energy demands. Each year, capacity is now expected to double or even triple. To meet these capacities, these centers will need renewable energy solutions (to hold off storms) and liquid cooling systems (to withstand the heat).
Department Circular No. 2017 prescribes the Philippine Government’s Cloud First Policy, dictating that government departments and agencies accelerate towards cloud computing adoption. Plagued by bureaucracy and legacy systems, the circular continues to describe cloud services as ‘robust’, ‘up-to-date’ and ‘state-of-the-art’, comparing Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and the United States as successful peer adopters. Data sovereignty is also invoked: “no such data shall be subject to foreign laws, or be accessible to other countries”—the cloud must only rain above our territories. Bidding for the Subic Data Center, the key to the National Government Data Center project, began in 2023. As of 2025, the center has yet to stand, in part due to budget constraints.
Other corporations aren’t ready to bite. The SM Group, the largest national conglomerate (who own 89 shopping malls in the country, all prefixed with SM) cite expensive power costs and calamities as risk factors. Interruption is disaster. These machines do not fail gracefully, they fail all at once—any downtime is an immense loss. With SM in the business of malls (masters of profit) and PLDT in monopoly with weak telecommunications (with little incentive to improve services for the general public, especially due to no competition in the current duolopy) probably stand at opposite ends of the spectrum for a reason.
Individual attempts at decentralization are still throttled by the giants of the network. Last year, it was estimated that 60,000 telecom towers were needed to meet the demand of the archipelago—while only 12,000 independent common towers existed. If we’ve been throttled for decades on cellular investments, this attraction to the ‘hyperscale’ data center makes priorities clear. (The same conglomerate owns both PLDT and Meralco, the energy giant that covers 55% of the country’s electricity output, including Sta. Rosa.) The populace still suffers from an increasing digital divide. If we consider cooling, take the blame on the individual and multiply it ten thousand fold, and you’ll have a rough picture of the needs of an average data center. Machines in farmlands carry the weight of nations beyond us, while we can barely sustain ourselves. Digital land has become more precious than physical land.
Once, we listened to creation mythologies that described the beginner as all sea and sky. We move towards a world of cloud: all our resources are slowly being reclaimed to host a digital ephemeral. Land, water, and energy all face insecurity, yet we are more invested in controlling the climate for computers rather than ourselves. In my childhood home, the fans point not to us, but to the computers so it is possible to work.
As these battles broil, I can’t help but think of the adjacent battle farmers face. Under incessant heat, timing their workshifts to end before the heat causes it to become physically impossible to work. But the sun is no issue when there is no more land to sow. Land grabbing illegally seizes the livelihood and homes of peasant workers, handing over hectares to subdivisions and complexes. At the border of Sta. Rosa, Calamba, and Cabuyao sits the 7,100 hectare Hacienda Yulo, where farmers have been violentlylosingtheirland since 1911 due to contest from real estate companies. Those who enrich the land are the poorest, and those who build for the cloud profit.
Central Luzon visit, House leaders check what’s left of raided POGO hubs.
THE POGO
In June 2024, Filipino authorities rescued 207 human trafficking victims from Lucky South 99, a 10-hectare gambling conglomerate in Porac, Pampanga. Porac is a developing industrial hub with agricultural roots with hectares of farmland are for sale on Facebook Marketplace. Think of what Menlo Park is to Meta, except to an illegal business nestled between fields and a golf course. (Lucky South 99 was mounted on 10 of 46 hectares of land that were illegally seized from farmers.) At least 40 other facilities in the province were raided.
Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs) are umbrella terms for predatory online services like electronic casinos, sports betting, scam hubs, clickfarms, and cryptocurrency schemes. POGOs largely service clients from other Asian nations, mainly China (which has banned casinos operating in the mainland), and multiplied during the 2016 presidency of Rodrigo Duterte. Smaller operations take over apartments and condominiums, gentrifying cities—but POGO hubs rise to meet multi-billion peso demand, forming industrial parks with company shuttles, dormitories, grocery stores, karaoke rooms, training rooms, Olympic-size swimming pools, and torture rooms. Inside, distressed workers with no choice. POGOs promise economic growth and job stability, but the scale of these illicit operations make way for abuse, human trafficking, and murders. Love scams (also known as pig butchering), crypto fraud, and gambling sites run with the quiet support of politicians and real estate giants, invested in money no matter how it is made.
The issue is beyond the Filipino. Lucky South 99 rescued 158 foreign nationals, many women were sexually trafficked and men were tortured. Most workers are swept away from their home countries with the promise of lucrative, digital jobs—and are suddenly stripped of their passports, goods, and eventually their identities, stuck in these compounds in a foreign country. Female victims awaiting deportation back to their home countries are sometimes pregnant, with what is now termed as ‘Pogo babies’. If you’ve ever stopped to question who are the people behind scams, did you ever guess that it would be modern day slaves? A whole economy has risen from preyed people preying on people.
It is not just POGOs that are in the business of exploitation. Many rebrand to call centers and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) hubs, industries which contribute 7–8% to the nation’s GDP. Globally, companies from tech, education, travel, to finance outsource customer care, IT, data labeling, and other menial service work to the Philippines. While BPOs are also a big sphere of operations, they are not withouttheirabuses, built upon a distancing between the exploiter and the exploited. ‘Innovation’ happens on the other end; the dirty work is left here.
Tropical bodies serve as technological infrastructure. It’s not only our land and resources that are extracted, but our bodies too. Humans label, screen, tag, and order data needed by AI, sometimes even performing the work themselves under the guise of AI. Content moderators clean social media feeds of extremism and gore in dehumanizing conditions. Virtual assistants become the backbone of digital businesses where labor is cheap. Semiconductor factories pay substandard wages and union bust as profits rise (electronics account for about 60% of national exports). The tropical technologist has been perfectly engineered for this role: valued for their proximity to whiteness, cleanliness of voice, and their lack of choice. All these make ease of our erasure, where progress seems to involve removing, or more precisely, obfuscating the humans from the equation. The tropical technologist is continuously undermined as slow, inefficient, cheap, and backwards—even when our actions are the very determinants of ‘progress’ for much of the world. Not only do they want our bodies, but they want our very identities.
We might be the most resilient machines: operating despite our land, mind, weather, and bodies ripped from us, slowed down by systems beyond us, servicing without question. We are cyborgs as Donna Haraway might place it, the results of both a social reality and the many fictions that have been ascribed to us, struggling with the new modernity. We might be the beginning of the world’s end and the country of the new technology.
THE TECHNOLOGIST
As an archipelagic people, we know the soil, semiconductors, and seas. We weather all that come with it, live in accordance to the storms, face the realities of all conditions once hidden, and respond to ecologies beyond our control. The tropical technologist has given their land, mind, and body to the machine. The tropical technologist has become machine. For all divides of low and high technology, we are its backbone at every order. Technology has reformed all nature, and this is truest in its reformation of the tropical human into an exploited, but well-oiled machine.
The pisonet models the fragmentation of the tropical technologist and their resilience; the air conditioner points to the entrapment of our people to capital and colonialism; the data center speaks to industrial priorities and amidst a national crisis with ongoing disregard to the land, food, and energy crises that the populace needs; and the POGO reveals the explicit degradation, violation, and undermining of our identity, with our bodies as infrastructure.
As the human that has become machine, our tropical bodies present alternative ways of being. Just as we once constructed machines to extend human capacity, we might reconsider the ways we decentralize, use, and live in this age: to embrace intermittency, adapt to the sun’s energy, prioritize localized infrastructures. But, where solar-powered servers and low technology are choices in the western world, the tropics remain plagued by larger infrastructural gaps. The least we can do is take action to prevent the continued deterioration of ourselves and machines. Our lands are razed by corporations, connectivity remains limited, the world’s systems are built off our exploitation, and face one disaster after another. We are not helpless, but we also are a cautionary tale: climate instability is only intensifying, and the third world will no longer be able to shoulder it alone. Let the tropical technologist be visible—look towards those who have stewarded both the material and technological worlds most closely.
Our relationship with the environment turned technology is one of becoming rather than dominion, a symbiosis that knows that technology reconstructs the human as much as human makes technology. Instead of supremacy, there is stewardship. In this archipelago, we’ve become both weathered and weather. Our bodies run off fire and water, we continue to play in floodwaters.
Technology was once a process to separate ourselves from nature, possessing it. Now, technology is our becoming-one-with-nature, a return—as the tropics have always felt it.
El Niño is caused by warm surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, leading to intense droughts and water scarcity. ↩︎
Facebook’s Free Basics plan was once tested in the Philippines, providing free access to mobile data but only allowing access to a limited amount of websites. Most people just went on Facebook. ↩︎
Ishmael Bernal’s Himala (1982) has been central in my unpacking of Mariology and apparition in today’s technological world. The film follows the descent of a feminine visionary Elsa, and the documentation of her belief, assault, renunciation and hereticism. Since Nora Aunor, who plays Elsa’s passing, I wanted to revisit the film more in the context of the (already much theorized) implications of her stardom’s influence on the film’s conceit around vision/image and hysteria/idolatry. As I’ll go on to describe, it is impossible to read any text on Himala without the shadow of Aunor; while I haven’t seen her work outside of it, knowing the film made her loss leave an impression on me… her mythology mirrors so much of the Filipino’s relation with Mary, and I can sense all the lives within her.
This is a scattering of thoughts about idolatry, cyberfeminism, suffering, and faith. It is a tiny tribute after Nora Aunor’s passing, and a reflection of “the girl” & its related theory with the “Noranian Imaginary”—an attempt to toss in the Filipino eye to our unfoldings of Catholic technologies.
(There are often many years in my life where I forget to pray, but I always start to remember…)
THE END OF THE WORLD
You are here my child, in this little humble mountain that my Son chose, like yourself, the little humble instrument of God, who will bring my children to come to the Mountain of salvation of Peace, Love, and Joy… You, my children, are here because God called you to be his instruments, to spread the message of love…
Message of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception at the Mountain of Salvation, Batangas, Philippines
Nora Aunor’s stardom cannot be divorced from all she is. Her rags-to-riches life, humility, and faith lay the groundwork for every character she plays, turning every screen into a shimmering mirror, reflecting the watcher back at her. This is not just acting—the girl extends her life and its legend through every scene. In Himala, this is all at its truest: Aunor stars not only as Elsa, but herself in a spectacle of belief and screen. When she passed this April 2025, some declared that cinema itself had ended.
Himala begins at the end of the world. Under blackened sky on barren hill, Elsa (Nora Aunor) sees an apparition of the Virgin Mary. We hear the calling with her, her ecstatic, blissful stare into the dark — a hint of something beyond — bliss after nothingness, agony after bliss. Torment in the chest. Then, her eyes are lifeless, tears fall, crying as the wounded Mary fades. Heretical, a demon inside her. One more day into the hill. Her hands are bloodied with stigmata. She begins engaging in faith healing despite disbelief from the men around her, and her once-poverty-stricken town finds renewed life in the pilgrims seeking Elsa’s prayer and miracle-making; a godless filmmaker even begins documenting her life, funded from his own pocket (the film is in itself, documentary-like in its eye & cinematography), and a brothel is opened for tourists. One afternoon, the filmmaker documents some boys raping Elsa and her main attendant—capturing a brutal truth and letting the camera play god. Soon, an epidemic spreads that faith alone cannot resolve, Elsa’s attendant commits suicide out of shame, and Elsa slowly deals with the people’s loss of resolve and a pregnany resulting from the assault—this virgin birth is enough to reignite people’s belief in her. At the film’s climax, she lets out an impassioned speech declaring that there are no miracles, “walang himala!”, and that all gods, good, and darkness are the invention of man. She is shot after this declaration, with her followers scattering and suffering in a stampede. In her last moments, her arms are outstretched, assuming the position of God, crucified.
Let us honour Mary, for such is the will of God, Who would have us obtain everything through the hands of Mary.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon for the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary
For Elsa, the end is the beginning of belief.
In her derelict town, the only sign of faith becomes her healing (her faith), which begins to spiral out of proportion as she continues to oblige and amass attendants for. She senses this spiritual deprivation, feeds upon it. Network effects: a sea of arms clawing to touch her, wanting her, needing her for salvation. Kissing her, grabbing her, clutching her as she wades through; they are all hungry, poverty-stricken, the most abandoned of the world. “We are poor. There’s nothing left for us but faith.” Her sight in Mary starts to be further affirmed as others see through her, with these healing acts becoming stand-ins for the missing material evidence for her conviction in Mary (otherwise, is she a victim to her own delusion from the very beginning?)—the body becomes a channel for belief. Elsa clarifies: her hands aren’t doing the healing, it’s Mary’s. All that she conduits is whatever God seeks to provide, attempting to answer what people seek. In the fall, the reward for devotion is always delusion.
Women are placed in this precarious position where our desires are taken from us and redefined, subjugating us as we embody and realize these distortions to their completion. The town’s desolation is filled by Elsa’s preachings and the rains come again to its arid place after Elsa is found pregnant against her will. Imitating Mary once more, the people rejoice at this likeliness, not knowing of the truth of her carrying. Every violation makes her more holy, only this warping of her body and soul furthers her as a channel — she is less like a human, but more like a network. The lead of the brothel confronts Elsa: “Pinagbilhan niyo sila ng mga himala. Pareho lang tayong puta.” You sold miracles. We’re both just whores.
Everything is projected unto the girl: personal sickness, violent sexual desire, responsibility for the skies above; the miracle comes from her continuous taking, repression, and delusion. People are poor in more ways than hand and mind, and only in this entire taking of Elsa can they be sickly satisfied. As our desire is transmuted, we are almost manipulated into clinging to beliefs no longer ours—perhaps out of a desperation to reject this loss of control, or an actual compromising of our own belief as the world around us shifts ceaselessly. Women carry the consequence of not just their own belief, but every delusion imposed unto them. She has no choice but to feed into a hysteria; the end and the beginning is a tragedy of belief. Watching droves of people arrive in Cupang felt almost like an understatement to the swarms in Filipino religious festivities; devotees get violent when they try to kiss the feet of statues and figures, and girls go insane as all they see is relegated to the peripheries. It places all the theatrics of the small “Elsa Loves You” parade in the shame—hardly an exaggeration, just a repetition of our desolation. All Elsa does is feed into the hunger, serve as a way for people to get closer to god, soon become god itself. The film marks Aunor’s canonization; she is now a superstar, one of the closest roles to modern ‘faith healing’ the nation carries—healing, prophesizing, shocking, and dying on screen for us over and over again. Elsa/Nora are tools, objects, machines, messiahs; in their degradation are they the most sanctified.
For as a man in his intellective powers participates in the Divine knowledge through the virtue of faith, and in his power of will participates in the Divine love through the virtue of charity, so also in the nature of the soul does he participate in the Divine Nature, after the manner of a likeness, through a certain regeneration or re-creation.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
A LOOKING
Interspersed throughout this text are quotations from Tiqqun’s Young-Girl,a dissection and theory towards the Young-Girl (or reduced here to “girl”) as capitalism’s model; a frame that Elsa / Nora simultaneously embodies, refutes, and transgresses. The figure of one who has her desires assigned to her by the market, yet appears to choose, or even demands these desires. Surfacely, Elsa turns her body into that of a commodity, given value and authority from both the domestic and divine, sculpting the soil and soul all around her. Nora plays a fiction that is still so clearly a familiar real. The camera records a camera, we watch a star grow into another star.
Just as the women in Elsa’s village began to attend to her, Aunor’s fanbase was largely composed of young women in the height of ‘Noramania’. Elevated but still espousing familiarity with her everydayness, activism, and humility—not divine, but medium. She’s bakya, unusual—because she is Filipino, and Filipinos who look Filipino cannot appear to be stars. But the network has been re-coded, there is a new alternative to being. She’s Ate Guy, referenced as familially as we refer to the Mother Mary. In one excerpt, Aunor reflects on her fanbase, it almost sounds like mourning: “My fans are no longer what they used to be but they remain loyal. There are those who simply got married, had children but when my name is mentioned, they still remember.” Devotion carries, people put faith in new things. If women have long played healing roles in Filipino folk faith and mysticism, I’d like to imagine a world where stardom reflects this restorative role, one of consolation rather than excess, one of the masses as consumed by them. But Elsa/Nora gives her body and presence, a weakly-drawn line between idol and healer that becomes a relinquishing of the self as this subject that may service all—this becomes her ultimate heresy, but also her at her holiest.
There is no Nora Aunor film that does not script her ‘own’ life. That script, as others have pointed out, invariably resolves the mythical suffering of the babaeng martir through some escapist fantasy or religious, almost superstitious, belief.
Neferti Tadiar, The Heretical Potential of Nora Aunor’s Star Power
A week before she was offered to star in Himala, Nora Aunor sees Mary in a dream. In this sleepscape, she’s somewhere in a church, and she sees the mother. “Ang natatandaan ko ‘lang ang sabihin sa mga tao na ‘wag silang makalimot magdasal.” Elsa reports seeing the Virgin Mary up a hillside. Marian apparitions largely manifest to women. She never fails to credit Christ for her successes; every other interview answer deflects to the lord. Sometimes, it is hard to read when the divine is invoked as an everyday subject that you might reach–if you pray enough–or if it means, wait for a miracle. With her, you’d believe the former: she is familiar, just us, arousing identification and succumbing to all’s need for self-identification.
Nora Aunor is not a sex symbol as other stars of her era might be called, but she certainly becomes the same type of subject anyway. “Acting through her eyes”, staring blankly, stoic and smooth, waiting to be enveloped, for us to fill her. She is amenable to it all, a being of solitude waiting to be riled by the higher things. The self becomes an instrument of relief, as Neferti Tadiar describes in her seminal text about Aunor’s heretical and miracular potential. She is invented.
For a while, she was close to letting us see through her eyes. The “Greatest Performance” saw Aunor directing, producing, writing, and starring in a dark cinema about stardom that spun around her life’s many fictions. She sings in its opening, is surrounded by obsession, men, and provides comfort to the poorest of her fans – it’s questionable whether they’re looking at her for her, or because looking is just the human thing to do. After the project‘s rejection at a festival for its themes, she suspended the project, banned its circulation, and the material deteriorated.
In Himala, Elsa debates, “saan ka naniniwala?”, she asks the filmmaker. “Ang kamera, gawa lang niyan ng Diyos, gaya ng tao yan.” She’s always looking through the screen at herself.
A WOUNDING
Elsa bleeds. She is not untouchable like the idols. Softness is a result of sacrifice, of a necessary roughness. Did she open these wounds herself? Was this mortification just an unconscious doing? Is anyone interested in curing her? Elsa sees. Mary is outfitted in a mantle of blue, her arms are outstretched, with a wound in her chest. In the first lights after her sighting, Elsa professes what she saw to her mother, who then has her cleansed. She’s on her stomach as they whip her, bleeding and heaving, but they say the spirit cannot be taken from her. Wounding will drive out evil; in this ritual, we harm the evil thing, not the person—but malevolence always transfers to its container. It is only in the next time we see Elsa wounded by a ‘miracle’, the marks bled unto her by the divine rather than man, that delusion is slowly given credence.
The town friar condones the revelations, warning of what it means to blind ourselves. People fear a woman unleashed, from Judiel Nieva to the Mountain of Salvation. When women assume roles as visionaries, it harks back to the era of babaylans (paid labor, as Elsa receives), where Catholicism today is merged with animist and folk practices, contrasting the patriarchal church of today that is not done discoursing over Mary’s image. Contemporarily, it’s girl intelligence, a sensing and percepting that is so inhuman that it must be rendered as divine. Drought and rain might also suggest greater forces at play, atmospheric conditions that are out of man’s reach, strung along by the hand of god, catalyzing Elsa’s practices.
When Elsa is shot at the film’s climax, taking the bullet into her chest. Her heart is suggested to hold the same gape that her vision of Mary had, prophesizing her own death. Right after this declaration, she “is irrevocably converted into an image without self or body”. Killing the girl preserves this image, suspending her in this role as intercessor where all may channel their own ailments or woes as she receives no redemption of her own. In the aftermath, she is branded a heretic—her body still subject to conquest and subjugation beyond breath. Her body and her very soul have been taken, she is a mere container, as she always has been.
Belief takes credit for the killing. The director’s proof of her assault may have afforded her salvation at the cost of the sanctity of her image (and we can’t ignore how this model of ‘truth’ was only captured by him watching her viciously violated, refusing to intervene), the people’s abandon once disease was too grave for mere belief to restore (is God not here, if there is sickness and suffering? if our faith alone does not call upon him?), or the loss of her own body’s sanctity (the pregnancy in her, life after death resulting from the ultimate overtaking of her masked as something holy, how sickening it is). Seeing is a fallible thing, faith is belief without images or comprehension. Perhaps it is in this desire for legibility that our bodies are compressed into subjects for violence; only after domination do we realize people’s desires.
Apparitions elude “seeing” as we know it. The divine is briefly glitched into humanity, “the miracle appears only to disappear again”. For female visionaries, any spiritual perception demands substantiation with corporeal evidence. (Majority of stigmatists are women.) It is an undesirable position for the visionary where utmost belief then leads to scorn from others, a branding of one’s senses and soul as inhuman or corrupted. God and Mary, forces beyond normal human affairs, meddling with the spirit and human systems of comprehension. The touching gets so intense she bleeds, stigmata is cybersex as Bogna Konior declares. But as Elsa later declares, there was no external force, the apparition had originated from her; the desire is technological, and the body is some cyborgian mess. Her bloodying is seductive. It is almost erotic; her look of rawness and ecstasy upon seeing the Virgin Mary is one of ultimate pleasure, release. This is the business of selling miracles, of whoring your body for divine grace.
Bodily suffering becomes prerequisite to faith, whether sourced from divine, other, or self. Easter in the Philippines is marked by crucifixion, self-flagellation, and other punishing forms of penance, despite decrial from the church. “I will not stop this for as long as I am alive, because this is what gives me life.” Elsa’s body becomes a text of pain as her private revelation is transformed into private spectacle, her mutilation is the affirmation of the miraculous. Pleasure is derived from this suffering—Elsa finds it in herself, and others find it in her body. Theologically of course, it is Mary who appears and Christ who carries the wounds. No longer is Elsa just an intercessor: she has collapsed the distance between the domestic and the divine. She has become Christ-like herself, bearing his wounds and his outstretched arms; as the ultimate ‘vessel’, she not only carries the Virgin’s tears, she suffers as Christ does. Turned from passive, Virgin receptacle into active preacher and performer, she is simultaneously empowered and exploited. People strike the nails into her, bore the unwanted child, take her life and the heart with it. The greatest way to achieve spirituality is to carry people’s suffering. Only when Elsa dies, reassuming the position of Christ, does she become the passive, Virgin receptacle ones more. The reward for her devotion is all this brutality.
It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives within me. Galatians 2:20
Her affection for mirrors, screens, cameras, lenses and other looking glasses – along with her affinity with sparkles, flashes, glints, and flares — equips her with a dazzling and hypervisible camouflage – an ability to distribute herself everywhere, to hide inside copies of her own image, to peek out and observe how she is being seen so that she can reassemble herself with agility.
Alex Quicho, Girl Intelligence
In Girl Intelligence, Alex Quicho describes the Girl in a way that feels akin to Aunor’s stardom and idolatry: After all, the flash of the camera might appear indistinguishable from the apparitional appearances of Mary often cloaked in this lightness, who might be both material and wounded, transcendent and elusive. Outside of her wounds, the camera wielded by the director provides the only other testament to “truth” in the film. He’s non believing, but here the camera is his god. Elsa’s rape is a revelation itself carried by the camera, documented by a man who initially refuses to use this image to save her. So much does technology intercede on belief that it warps our understanding of the miraculous: distortions of light on Polaroid are seen as the Virgin Mary, appearing in streaks and blotches for pilgrims at Bayside. Media exacerbates religious phenomena, even conceiving of them. But Elsa/Aunor were enigmatic even before her capturing. Aunor, graced by her humility and softness, and Elsa, admired for his silent strangeness and starkness, are both networks in themselves. Noranian figures are relatable, malleable, yet always the victim of sexual violation and excess: whether holy or star (or maybe they are the same thing), she is always ravaged, never exempt for carnality, the ideal subject of dominion. Martyr, idol, saint, Virgin, all in one.
A TRANSLUCENCY
I have a different image of Jesus Christ which is that of a woman, a very ordinary-looking Filipino woman, who drinks with them and has stories to tell.
Jonathan Beller
Elsa, Aunor, and Mary might embody a trinity of translucency. Recursing upon these systems of feminine mediation, each one is only affirmed at its highest potential through the other, visible towards each other, enfleshing one another. Mary appears to Elsa, Elsa channels Mary, Aunor performs Elsa; but also, Aunor is indistinguishable as Elsa, Elsa transcends Mary, and Mary sculpts Aunor as a vessel.
Nora Aunor at EDSA 1986, From the Presidential Museum and Library
Networks demand translucency; absence fosters each figure’s desire. In controlling the spectacle of their apparating and disappearing, these women must simultaneously be everywhere and nowhere, mortal and sacred, seductive and virgin, Filipino and attractive, empty and containing. “Her cyclical death and reappearance, her ability to mutate inside the skin of an instantly recognisable form.” To become a vessel, we must be translucent: sight at the edge of vision; vesselhood demands that we become absent & malleable enough to channel all desire beyond herself. Aunor illuminates but also obscures every role she’s in, now inseparable from the imaginary around her; Elsa becomes visible through her agony and consequent healing (so much that she is accused of wanting the attention, sexualizing herself); and Mary has always been the mediator of and as paradox. The labor of womanhood is of losing. Mary models the purity that Elsa/Aunor/we might all aspire towards—a model only possible if we become inhuman, requiring that something beyond us intervenes, where our becoming requires divine intervention.
( Think of the eclipse again. In the beginning, shrouded in the darkness, at her most opaque, Elsa’s eyes glimmered of pure bliss as the revelation of Mary came unto her. As light came again, the moon coming away, a face tinged with sadness and fear — the world has become clear again, but she must cloud this light. )
Look at the climax, the end of all ecstasy, the ending of the end. “Walang himala! Ang himala ay nasa puso ng tao. […] Tayo ang gumagawa ng himala” There are no miracles. Miracles are in our hearts… We make the miracles themselves. While many read this as a declaration of fraud, the ultimate divulgence of Elsa’s conceit, the miracle still exists within the human; it is solely too much for Elsa to bear. The so-called ‘miracle’ of her pregnancy is implanted within her by the violence of man; there is no denial of God Himself, but the denial of the origins of these miracles—of which the ferocity, abuse, sickness, and desperation comes from and is cured by mortal upon mortal. Reshaping the narrative of ‘divine intervention’, the feminine trio has become inhuman, ingrained with the mantle that was once credited only to God. Spiritual agency has been redistributed, just as babaylans mediated with the world of souls by manipulating nature. It is in this clearance that she has become undeniably crystalline, each woman frozen and canonized and theorized upon and devoured. Flesh has limits, but now that we are more-than-human, we can transcend. In her last breaths, her hand above her breast has made her, she breathes and dies in front of the lights – incessant flashes watch the wounds course through, and no one attempts to save the savior. Camera beams cloak her again, fixing her in everyone’s eyes. A hint of ecstacy. As her lifeless body lay cruciform, she has become as Christ, divine.
Miracle economies are transfixed upon and captured by the female interface. Every system that women sustain demands that they be devoured. The only way to transcend is to find the inhuman panging within the feminine body. Networks feed upon disappearance, recover after their dislocation, are to be interfered with and tampered— they prove that faith manifests most when it is distributed, deluded, and at the verge of dissolution. Every century meets new martyrs and stars, more mediators who collapse identification and allow their vulnerability to coalesce them into something beyond. Girls are all networks, inhuman channels and conduits that transcend as they become translucent, delusion is her language. Embodying the carnality and sensuality that everyone wants: to become a star, to be purified, to empty themselves into someone, to cry out, to be saved.
After Nora Aunor’s passing, I can’t help but hear all this talk about her legacy in the words of Mary. It’s beautiful to hear of a life described as a meeting point, to evoke a believing of a beyond for those across class lines, to carry around with her this imagination that provokes this infinitely reproducible yet irreducibly mysterious body. I’m looking at her lost films, the shimmer of her eyes beguiling every lens, this modesty against everything. What is the consequence of Himala? Still, women are exploited, stardom continues to victimize, the church’s progressivism and position is questioned, and Aunor herself has become canonized. If the divine can be discovered within the body, then divine intervention has never been separate from human action; there is no salvation that doesn’t require our participation.
