Barako (2022)
Barako meditates on themes of masculinity, legacy, and paternal relationships through the visual exploration of five fights my father fought in as a serial street fighter coming of age in the Philippines.
Growing up between the province of Lucban and the metropolis of Manila during the 1960s and ‘70s when the “tough guy,” or “barako” archetype was idolized, my father was engrossed in his martial arts and boxing training. He told me countless fight stories when I was a child, vivid tales of surprise attacks and “import” fighters and the techniques required to survive being cornered by eight men. He never lost a fight, not even his first one at the age of five during a game of marbles.
When I got older, he told me he utilized these skills to protect himself and his friends throughout his youth, but he also fought as a way to survive and cope with the anger he held towards his father due to patriarchal parenting. Aligned in this conceptual parallel, my father’s final fight was at the age of twenty-five, at his father’s viewing. A brawl that is not remembered the same way by any two people who were present, and the fight story he has provided the least amount of detail for, my father left for America just weeks after this event and never fought again.
Through photographs, archival print media, recorded interviews, and prose that all reconstruct my family’s oral histories of him at this time, Barako creates a larger portrait of my father, his boyhood, and our relationship.
Barako is divided into five chapters that each begin with a specific fight my father was in from 1961 to 1982, ages 5 to 25.
From there, each section delves into different aspects of his life during the time of that fight to paint a multifaceted picture of his youth that contain moments, places, people, and pursuits that provided space for joy and relief away from anger and fighting.
The project is made up of five primary components. The first is a series of recorded conversations with my father, his childhood friends, and our family members who are significant to his youth. Recounting their own individual memories about my father and the larger family during these decades serve as a foundation for an intricate oral family history.
The recorded accounts of events told by my father and family also served as a basis for the original imagery I created, which aimed to reconstruct collective and individual memory. The original imagery focused on portraiture of those who I held recorded conversations with, landscapes of locations where my father fought, trained, or found respite in, and detail images that are significant to a fight or are symbolic to the masculinity being explored.
Archival family photos are integral to showcasing family and gender dynamics within Barako as well as giving a visual cue for the viewer to further delve into the world my father and our family lived in. Further, the project contains a rare collection of archival Filipino print media from the 1950s to 1980s which feature articles about martial law, Western Marlboro cigarette advertisements, and profiles on champion boxers to provide a fuller contextual look at the politics, trends, and masculine culture of the time.
The final component of Barako is a series of original prose that reflects upon the deeper understandings of masculinity, intergenerational trauma, and the changing relationship I’ve experienced with my father. The writing for this project is ongoing as I aim to produce a collection of poetry and personal essays to supplement a photobook of Barako.
“Current Obsessions” Exhibition. London College of Communication, London. 16-19 November 2022.