digital dambana

Dambana, meaning sacred site in tagalog, can refer to a range of holy spaces including an altar, or a place of ritual or ceremony. “The Digital Dambana” invites us to consider if / how the digital realm can be harnessed as a site to resurrect the presence of tactile, relational, land and life based ecologies and epistemologies (ways of knowing) through providing a space for archivitalizing (archiving + revitalizing) covenants, rituals, prayers, ceremonies without flattening their quantum qualities and sacred significance.

This project will also be a parallel + sisterly project to the work I am facilitating at the Scarborough Museum to hold space for BIPOC youth to unsettle conventional museum histories and to create multi-media altars to honour the geneaologies, which will include ae workshop on digital altar making.

This project and the questions that surface from it are directly birthed out of my time in the Philippines spent with ritualists and indigenous communities in the “last frontier” of the Philippines - Palawan - and the moral, spiritual, and technical entanglements I observed that necessitated “feminist” questions around how to hold space for researching and remembering knowledge with a practise that is beyond anti-oppressive, and in fact, revivalist, resurrectionist, regenerative.

While this project will be rooted in reflections on my experience in Tkaronto, Tio’tiah:ke / Mooniyag (Montreal), and the Philippines, it will invite supra-local, collaborative community-based research.