Eva began as catalogue of objects, people and memories surrounding the house of my grandmother, Eva’s in Bacolod, a city in the south of the Philippines, far away from the chaos of Manila.
It’s in this place that we would spend our summers, many times even flying back in December for Christmas. It’s the space I associate with the most transcendent parts of my childhood; sipping hot chocolate, the smell of my grandmother’s detergent, road trips, family gatherings, and the many summers still held and remembered well. In my recent trips I began to notice Enteng, the four-year-old son of Michelle, our family’s helper. Perhaps, with the recent events, or just having grown a bit older myself, his own interactions with the space suddenly struck me – the way he climbed the stairs, the random materials and corners he would find and decide to inhabit, his own small and light body running by the now unused pool.
Looking at him I saw myself and the space differently. With the photographs that followed came a juxtaposition of experiencing nostalgia and the blunders of anxiety towards the idea of deletion, towards the house finally being sold.
Eva is not just a record of shared histories between my family, our helpers, and their own families who grew up with us, but an attempt to gather pieces of evidence of the passage of time – a pursuit to document and to remember things before they move further away from reach.
