May 17-24, 2025
First United Building Community Museum
Escolta Street, Manila
In this sensorial investigation, Shara Francisco began with a hypothesis: “objects can feel” (or as the exhibit title declares in Filipino: “ang mga bagay ay nakakaramdam”). Carrying her experience with visual programming and their interactions with sound artists, she then asked: “how?”
More than anthropomorphizing (“how can objects feel?”), there’s also interfacing (“how can objects simulate feeling / how can objects make you feel?”). In exploring these questions, the artist’s arsenal involved field recordings and texture and 3D scans of actual objects – eventually amassing data points from what she and the digital recorders can see and hear. Using these as inputs, she generated visual outputs, now taking the form of mapped projections and holograms. Simply put, there was a transformation from the physical to digital, with an attempt to keep the sensing intact. The most important of which, for the artist, is the sense of pagkakapa-kapa, or touching.
With ang mga bagay ay nakakaramdam as a site-specific project as well, there is also particularity not only in choosing the objects but, more importantly, their location. Shara Francisco, marking her 2 years as part of 98B COLLABoratory based in First United Building in Escolta, Manila, has already developed a familiarity with the building. She was drawn to the liminal spaces for the reason that, in her words, “these in-between spaces elicit a sense of security and uncanny comfortability of being confined in a space where one can momentarily observe the mundanity around them.”
Now, arriving at the end, the conclusion. Concocting corporeal and digital components, Shara Francisco presents to us her alchemized objects – feeling, produced-from-feelings, feeling-producing.
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