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Dead Letter Office (2025)
Completed at Recology San Francisco Art Residency
Photos Courtesy of Minoosh Zomorodinia
Installation completed with materials found from Recology Public Reuse and Recycling Area (shoes, cups, bowls, fabric, stamps, wood, monitors, cement, porcelain and aluminium plates, USPS boxes, bed frame, wine shelf, bubble wrap, metal frame, chicken wire, cement, spray paint, dollhouse, reflective plastic grid, 35mm films, fabric, lamps) 30-minute seven-channel video installation | Dimension Variable
My residency at Recology, a resource recovery facility in San Francisco, has been deeply transformative in my thinking about the global intimacies via supply chains. In scavenging domestic objects like plates, shoes and clothes, I realised that the average American household largely consists of products manufactured entirely or in part in the Global South; the abundance of imported goods render them mundane. The mountains of discarded imports reminded me, as an international student, how nation-state borders sometimes seem more welcoming to products than people who manufactured them, but also how, by crossing borders, we exist separately as foreign matter.
In Dead Letter Office (2025), I simulate a fictional postal department where undeliverable mail is held, similar to the pile at Recology itself, where lost objects are sorted and re-routed. I displayed these imported products queuing in line, waiting for their turn to be processed, caught in bureaucratic indeterminacy awaiting and advocating in transit. Looking at the stamps found at Recology and family archives, they recolour my envy for objects’ mobility towards gratitude: these migrant parcels and letters are avatars, agents of care, connecting communities. They cross borders when I cannot.
At the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts, I was taught that art can be a strategy to uplift marginalized voices, that we have to try to embody liberation and solidarity before we achieve them. This reminds me of the countless community gatherings documented in a series of family albums I found in the Public Reuse and Recycling Area at Recology. These photographs belonged to a person who migrated to the Bay Area from the Philippines to work as a nurse in the 70s. They also became a portal into a colonial history of the commodification of migrant care labour in the United States, of chasing the American Dream, of aspiring beyond a ceiling of opportunities one was given -- one that preceded my time in the United States but paved ways for political conditions that permitted my stay here.
This residency was my exploration of how I can practice solidarities with Asian American communities, to speak nearby and beside interrelated cultures in search of liberation. By conducting oral history interviews to include the voices of Filipino-American friends and a Filipino nurse about their family history in relation to the 70s’ migration of Filipino nurses, Dead Letter Office transforms into a space of collective remembering, reflecting on diverse, situated perspectives on how the past continues to act in the present, and how we can continue to care for each other amidst uncertain times.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Recology San Francisco for providing such a generous learning environment. Special thanks to Deborah Munk, Catherine McMahon, Karina Hammoud, and Ailsa Harju. This project would not have been possible without the support of Rocelle, Jianna So and Dr. Katherine Nasol, who generously let me interview them to learn more about Filipino American history and their family. I am indebted to the archives, thank you for documenting joy and care in your life.