The Kakaiba collection

2020, 2023 | Digital Collage Series

The Kakaiba Collection is a series of 4 digital collages that explores Velasco’s Filipino ancestry, childhood memories, and diasporic experience in Canada. The project merges ancestral representations of the Philippines, such as textiles from the Ifugao, Kalinga, Tausug, Moro, Yakan, Blaan and T’boli Indigenous groups, which are then fused with popular fashion and culture. Through a visual vocabulary of Philippine and Western representations culled from the internet and social media, Velasco constructs a generous vision of Philippine beauty and simultaneously, levels racial hierarchies.

The artist refuses Western hegemonies and is crucially aware of the displacement of tribal and Islamic cultures of the Philippines. In light of this, he proposes a future in which minoritized visualities can thrive and are as globally recognized and celebrated as Nike, Versace, and Hello Kitty. Velasco puts contemporary Philippine Indigenous culture in conversation with global consumerism to construct a diasporic subjectivity that is in excess of Western cultural imperialism that seeks to erase difference.