"Tropikalye is an artist-initiated mutual co-learning resource on contemporary Philippine aesthetics. Like today, content is and will be collected on a voluntary submission basis from the people who use it, and editable whenever necessary.
Relevant content is defined as images or texts that describe objects and phenomena with aesthetic value found in the day-to-day, preferably on the street. “Street” (or kalye, from the Spanish calle) is used to distinguish from things that belong in indigenous territories and spaces that are maintained by institutions and individuals of a certain stature—these things are already taken care of. Tk’s focus lies in curiosities not necessarily found outdoors but within the context of the vernacular.

"Three out of five Thrashing Palm Trees in the essay of the same title, drawn with water and a hydrophobic solution on sheets of plywood, are featured in the exhibition as durational installations. With the trees patterned after found footage of storms in countries that occupy the top ranks of the Climate Risk Index (among them, the Philippines), despite global-scale carbon emissions coming from the other hemisphere, geographic interconnectedness is asserted in the face of the climate crisis.

A 3D-printed speculative island, formed by the combination of the political borders of Cagayan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, links the issue of climate to the lasting impact of colonialism. Located in postcolonial Philippines and Pakistan respectively, these regions are longitudes apart but where massive, storm-induced landslides have occurred in 2020. In the space adjacent to the green-lit room where the Trees evaporate over time are two large paintings of non-images composed of magnified Xerox noise, deceptively unassuming. Upon close inspection, the print error motif, taken from the flyleaves of a poorly digitised copy of The Philippine Islands and Their People (Worcester, 1898), appears like islands—a Gaian Assembly of interconnected pieces of land, recognised by the colonist insofar as it served their agendas.

Furthering a call to relationalism, two small paintings of Mateo, a typical Philippino according to American colonist-author D. C. Worcester, are each mounted next to other works that represent the different sides of the same coin. Fashioned after Mateo’s portrait in the bad copy of The Philippine Islands and Their People, he is blackened, almost to the point of invisibility and erasure, surrounded by specks of an archipelago he couldn’t truly call his own." [1]

Read Nice's full essay on archipelagic thinking here

_{[1] Nice Buenaventura, “The New Word for World Is Archipelago — Nice Buenaventura,” nicebuenaventura.com, accessed March 26, 2024, https://nicebuenaventura.com/The-New-Word-for-World-is-Archipelago.}