MODULE: GLORY
GLORY is a black-and-white animated video that unfolds as a meditative journey through shadow, matter, and memory. A lone male figure, dressed in a seafarer’s uniform and safety helmet, walks slowly through a cave-like space where maritime remnants, a stranded shipping container, suspended chains, suggest both labor and abandonment. The pace is deliberately measured, enacting a queer temporality that resists forward propulsion in favor of lingering, suspension, and drift. The ambient sounds of water, waves, dripping, echoes, evoke the sea’s haunting presence just beyond the frame, situating the cave as both shelter and threshold. As the figure moves through alternating light and darkness, the space becomes psychological as much as architectural: an interior of exile, a landscape of sedimented histories.
At the video’s center, a rupture appears, a black sphere or “hole” that interrupts the illusion of depth and perspective. Floating unanchored, it becomes a site of abstraction and disorientation, recalling both the cosmological and the erotic, a nod to queer visual culture and the symbolic force of the glory hole. This visual disruption queers space and narrative, suggesting a collapse of linear vision and a turn toward the unknowable. GLORY is both elegy and inquiry: a moving image meditation on queer seafaring, solitude, and the opaque depths of desire.
Title: Glory
Medium: 3D Animation, digital video, flatscreen monitor, and painted hand truck
Length: looped
Year: 2024
MEMORY MODULE: KEREL TRILOGY
The KEREL Trilogy comprises three black-and-white experimental short films, MUTYA, NANAY CLEO’S DREAM, and KEREL (Sea of Love), centered on the life of Kerel, a queer Filipino seafarer who traverses time and space. The trilogy draws inspiration from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle, itself an adaptation of Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest, yet reframes the narrative through a postcolonial and queer Filipino lens, foregrounding questions of identity, intimacy, and belonging.
Utilizing a hybrid methodology that interweaves archival, found, and newly filmed footage, the films function as memory modules, enacting a rhizomatic exploration of Kerel’s relationships, with his lover, his family, and his nation, while challenging conventional temporalities and narrative structures. Through processes of revision, layering, and recomposition, the trilogy negotiates the entanglements of personal, historical, and ecological memory, reflecting Cuyson’s broader artistic practice, which operates at the intersection of abstraction, queer ecologies, and the poetics of the sea.
MUTYA
Director: Jon Cuyson
Writer: Jon Cuyson
Length: 8 Mins. 10 Seconds
Format: Digital Video in Black & White Finish
Dialogue: Tagalog
Subtitles: English
Producer: EVERYDAY PRODUCTIONS
Country: Philippines
Year: 2021
Synopsis:
Set in the present, Mutya follows a shy transgender woman who tends to the blind mother of her OFW seafarer boyfriend, Kerel. Anchored in an intimate, possibly imagined phone conversation, the film unfolds as a dreamlike exploration of desire, anxiety, and emotional distance.
ANG PANAGINIP NI NANAY CLEO
(NANAY CLEO’S DREAM)
Director: Jon Cuyson
Writer: Jon Cuyson
Length: 11 Mins.
Format: Digital Video in Black and White Finish
Dialogue: Tagalog
Subtitles: English
Producer: EVERYDAY PRODUCTIONS
Country: Philippines
Year: 2021
Synopsis
Nanay Cleo, a visually impaired Babaylan, a Filipino precolonial shaman, senses danger threatening her seafarer son. Drawing on her ancestral powers, she invokes protective rituals, navigating the liminal space between intuition, spiritual authority, and maternal devotion.
KEREL (SEA OF LOVE)
Director: Jon Cuyson
Writer: Jon Cuyson
Length: 14 Mins. 30 Seconds
Format: Digital Video in Black and White Finish
Dialogue: Tagalog
Subtitles: English
Producer: EVERYDAY PRODUCTIONS
Country: Philippines
Year: 2021
SYNOPSIS
Trapped in a cargo ship during the lockdown, Kerel, a queer Filipino seafarer escapes through his memory, and recalls his complicated past, present, and future self.
MODULE: DANCING THE SHRIMP (WHODOYOUTHINKYOUARE)
Motions of this Kind: Propositions and Problems of Belatedness
curated by
Merv Espina
Renan Laru-an
Rafael Schacter
Dancing the Shrimp (whodoyouthinkyouare) operates at the intersection of history, fiction, and personal subjectivity, presenting a rhizomatic engagement with memory, labor, and ecological displacement. Conceived for Motions of this Kind: Propositions and Problems of Belatedness at The Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University College London, the work interrogates historical narratives by emphasizing the interpretative process and the delicate interplay between authenticity and invention. Through the insertion of fiction into historical frameworks, the module foregrounds the repressed, marginalized, or overlooked aspects of history, in line with Michel de Certeau’s notion of the “repressed” within dominant discourses.
The installation synthesizes new and existing works across painting, photography, sculpture, plant matter, and site-specific objects, generating a multilayered tableau that oscillates between permanence and impermanence. Trompe l’oeil sculptures, drawing inspiration from the Chinese tradition of “scholars’ rocks”, are carefully painted, finished, and installed on bespoke pedestals composed of found, borrowed, or purchased objects. These pedestals, like the rocks themselves, function as catalysts for recognition, situating the quotidian and the precious, the banal and the singular, in a shared relational field. The stage-like installation transforms into a landscape of personified bodies, mountains, waves, and clouds, inviting a symbiotic relationship between viewer, object, and site.
Historically and conceptually, the work draws upon research into 18th-century Filipino settlements in the Louisiana Bayou and the Manila Village in Barataria Bay, Mississippi, where settlers engaged in the ritualized labor of shelling shrimp by foot, an act referred to as “dancing the shrimp.” This labor, simultaneously rhythmic, repetitive, and precarious, informs both the material and conceptual strategies of the installation. Through its layering of found, archival, and newly fabricated objects, the module functions as a palimpsest of histories and imaginaries: each gesture, material choice, and spatial arrangement preserves traces of lived experience while refracting them through fictional and aestheticized frameworks.
In Dancing the Shrimp, Cuyson advances a Memory Module that situates art-making as both an analytic and contemplative practice. The work emphasizes the porosity between fact and fiction, history and narrative, object and observer, demonstrating how memory—both collective and personal—can be reinterpreted, contested, and re-imagined within a mutable, ecological, and performative space. As a Memory Module, it underscores the dynamic potential of the exhibition to act as a node within a broader rhizomatic framework, linking narratives across time, place, and medium, while challenging viewers to reconsider the fluid boundaries between reality and imagination, permanence and ephemerality.
Dancing The Shrimp (whodoyouthinkyouare)
Multivariable installation with constructed, found and purchased objects, sculpture, sound, sewn fabrics, drawings, lights, headset, and vinyl stickers
Dimensions variable
2019
2019 / The Brunei Gallery / SOAS University of College London / England
MEMORY MODULE: DANCING THE SHRIMP
The stage is set for scenes that rise above the surface, barely above the level. The ground circulates around the museum. In fact, the museum becomes it, surrounded by details of a moving theater, or better still, aspects of design that make this theater quite present though also quite elusive, dispersed like the semblance of sea around it.
The trace to history is sheer but salient. Filipino mariners in the nineteenth century jumped off the fabled Manila Galleon and settled in Saint Malo in the Louisiana bayou. This was the kernel of a community that in the 1930s morphed into the Manila Village in Barataria Bay in the Mississippi Delta by the Gulf of Mexico. From such a site came the Manila Men who took off the shells of shrimps by the nimble movement of their adroit feet, conjuring a kind of dance that is also intense, obsessive labor.
The exhibition speaks to this historical moment and restages it across a range of devices that transpose the said narrative or event and its effects. A beguiling scenography thus is created, animated by remixed music of ritual chant and electronic drone, sprawling painting, enigmatic text, costume, museum memorabilia and furniture, and the pervasive tint of blue from both fluorescent and decal. The artist performs diverse roles in making all this happen: researcher, production designer, creative director, music mixer, painter. In this heady ensemble, the tale of the Filipino seafarer named Kerel is inevitably evoked, a traveler across time zones, mired in the fine grain of work, in the silhouette of structure, in a world of water.
While the tangent of history is cast cogently, the mode of knowing is mythic, intuitive, aleatory. The body inhabits a space of fantasy, memory, and the very urgent experiment of figuring out a liquid present: the eye is fooled, the senses swim in various data (sand, mannequin, mirror), and the migrant in the museum finally faces and feels the artifice of relations, or those ties that put in place or shed those layers of self. - Dr. Patrick D. Flores
2016 / Vargas Museum / Philippines
Dancing the Shrimp: Manila Men in Louisiana
In the 19th century, Filipino seafarers, the Manila men, built stilted villages in the Louisiana bayous, including Saint Malo and Manila Village. There they pioneered a practice known as “dancing the shrimp”: spreading shrimp to dry on wide decks, then rhythmically shuffling over them to loosen shells. What began as necessity became a choreography of labor and survival, binding migration, ecology, and invention.
Though hurricanes and rising seas erased these settlements, dancing the shrimp endures as both technique and metaphor, an embodied archive of diaspora where bodies, histories, and ecologies remain clustered, filtered, and sedimented across time.