Meet the Crew!
Tattoos in the Philippines are a sacred art form with thousands of years of history behind them. Like several Austronesian cultures, tattooing was so widely practiced within these lands that when Spanish colonizers arrived, indigenous communities throughout the Visayas were called "Los Pintados," or the painted people. These markings were described as intricate patterns rich with symbolic references to land, community, family, and martial accomplishments. Today, however, even with the growing acceptance of body art, this artform is commonly considered to be taboo due, in part, to centuries of colonial indoctrination.
Markings of Remembrance seeks to address this taboo by refamiliarizing ourselves and others within our community with our ancestral practices, the symbols through which our stories are told, the plants, animals, and objects those symbols represent, and the ways in which these patterns have lived on through various forms of cultural production. This project began with the formation of a cohort of Filipino peers. Together, we researched and shared our individual histories, the islands from which our families migrated, the languages spoken within our families, and the roles our family members held within their communities, all while learning about the symbols and patterns traditionally used to tell our stories.
