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Parenthood to his younger siblings was foisted on him at age 14 when his parents opted to move to California as overseas workers. A nation whose labor policy encourages emigration because its economic survival depends on the remittances from Filipinos abroad incentivizes leaving–one’s country of birth, one’s family, one’s past. There is no here here because the future is dreamed of elsewhere. In Echoes of Departure (2024), Pascua pokes and prods into at least three generations of migration on both sides of his family through interviews and personal archives. Departures for the proverbial greener pastures promise to ease economic precarity for families but such separations create psychological arrears on arrival.

In 2003, Pascua himself migrated to Norway, a country of arctic climate so different from tropical Philippines that he inscribed with his body plodding through waist-high snow the word, “SAKLOLO,” which could be read only from above. Titled Lost in Translation (2007), a pilot in an aircraft hovering above it would only know that the word is a plea if they understood it as the Filipino word for “HELP.” Pascua creates works through which he attempts to dissect and digest the ravages of dislocation. His works limn the contours of political violence, the legacies of colonization, the indelible traces of collective trauma.

He writes the word “HISTORY” and traces the written word repeatedly until its resolution has dissolved into a thicket of scrawls in Scratching the Surface (2009). The act begins as a meditation on the word and progresses into a manic mode that captures the erasures and convenient untruths that warp into meaninglessness over time.

In Alikabok (Dust) (2016), he creates the portrait of Philippine revolutionary leader, Andres Bonifacio, by hacking the wall with an ax, to reenact the anecdotal account of the national hero’s brutal murder by machete by the henchmen of Emilio Aguinaldo, who subsequently became the first president of the Philippines. To Pascua, “[Bonifacio’s] murder is the foundation of the Philippine government, and this crime is the dust that the Filipinos still breathe.”

Trained as a painter, Pascua eventually found creating imagery on canvas inadequate for the agita he needed to exorcize. Pushing his body through deep snow, writing a loaded word on frenzied repeat, creating a portrait with heavy blows comprise attempts at somatic release. Paroxysms are made with physical force, not prayerful introspection.

“Three hundred years in a convent and fifty years in Hollywood” summarizes Philippine colonial history with three centuries of religious indoctrination under Spain followed by half a century under American rule. Quite active in his faith in his younger years, Pascua has since shed religion from his worldview. The Rites of Men (2019-present) comprises the varying modifications he has made on the crozier typically held by leaders of the clergy. He views this series as a commentary “on senseless rituals” both “in the creative process such as repetitive actions” as well as in religious ceremonies. His interpretations of the crozier, inspired by the shepherd’s crook as a symbol for pastoral work and spiritual guidance, are cobbled together with found objects and organic material such as feathers, branches, and animal antlers. They serve as totemic objects “that form a critique of inherited beliefs and ideologies.”

Chinua Achebe’s observation that “Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him” is the text that serves as Pascua’s talisman in his practice. The assembled objects, performative drawings, and video look squarely at the realities that beg to be reshaped, exposing the nerve points in the arc of his pursuit of grasping the forces that lead people toward risk and abandonment. Acknowledging the debts incurred upon departure, Pascua confronts the painful legacies of displacement. Even as he might privilege what’s punk, pitiless, or profane about the human condition, it is motivated by an unblinking demand of the self and the world a profoundly different path forged only through struggle. Casting harsh light on the face of the present order of reality for the children and orphans of diaspora is how the artist imagines communities can summon the strength to craft a different order of reality.

–Carina Evangelista

Artist stipend provided by Torrance Art Museum Advocates.