17 AUG 2021 ~ In our second to the last conference, Isola links gender, nationhood, and architecture with spectatorship, power, and nature. By mapping cinematic, biographical, literary, and artistic references into a supernatural ecosystem, she asserts her agency as an artist, babaylan, and transpinay.
This livestreamed event was hosted on and livestreamed from Eternal Conferences' Twitch channel! Moderated by artist and educator Alfred Marasigan. Sign language interpretation by Maan Tugade. Translated transcription by Tricia Velez (coming soon).
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About Conference No. 5's Isola Tong
Isola Tong (b. 1987, Manila) is an artist and architect engaging Filipina shamanic and autochthonous transgender imagination through performance, installation, print, painting and moving image to disrupt the hegemony of western understandings of nature and identity. Her interests include:
Ecological Drag as a practice of embodying precolonial indigenous genealogy of gender-variant women in the context of a world at the brink of ecological collapse to discover new pathways to self-determination.
Vernacular Fiction as a practice of articulating and centering contemporaneous figurations of marginality and transness in decolonializing patriarchal and racialized narratives.
Feral Poetry as a practice of conveying the interconnectivity of biological agents in subaltern and transfeminist terms.
Encounters with the environment, locality and objectification informs her fictive speculations and feral poetics as modes of dissidence from normative notions through queer vernacularity.
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Maan Tugade has been working as a Senior Data Processor at the same company for 19 years, but due to her health situation, she decided to face new work challenges.
She believed in continuous learning so she enrolled in TESDA TVET took up the course of Event Management Services NClll and the Company they hired her as Event Coordinator eventually as Administrative Staff but due of Pandemic Situations it's now temporary closed.
She is a Godly person as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, and she volunteers to help People with Disability by joining the Deaf Community since 2012 as a Minister who teaches them Values from the word of God.
To expand more her knowledge in Sign Language, Maan enrolled and got her Certificate of Completion at the Philippine Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, Inc.(PRID) and DLSC Saint Benilde for Filipino Sign Language 2. This skill also helped her find a part time job and several experiences to interpret for people who are deaf. She graduated at Kalayaan College as Fine Arts year 2018.
