Melanie Ubaldo

Kontento naman ako / I am content / Ég er sátt

Blönduð innsetning / Mixed media installation

230 x 190 x 200 cm

2022

I create monuments to unbelonging. My artistic practice constitutes an examination of profound intersectionality by way of autobiography. These are the vulnerable narratives about myself that I choose to share. My works contemplate issues about the formation and perception of identity and how it is expressed through language. And in doing so, I attempt to break down and question socially transfixed roles, the process of socially transfixed roles and the process of social integration/marginalization of difference.  

Historically marginalized, I insist on my own identity, as someone whose very existence is a daily defiance to a Western white heteronormative patriarchal world system; I celebrate my otherness by creating artworks on the side of this marginality. 

With the strident urgency of identity and racial politics in mind, I will identify myself as broadly descriptive as possible. As if someone comically tethered to the confines of leftist political correctness (not to seem insensitive), broadly speaking I locate myself primarily as an atheist, 30 year old feminist, heterosexual Asian immigrant Icelandic woman of Filipino descent. I am also a daughter, a sister, vegetarian and a member of an inter-racial couple, and with these signifiers at hand I usually find myself as part of some group that is ignored, marginalized, trivialized, fetishized, rendered invisible and unheard, inconsequential, and defined as “other”. Not to mine all the exclusionary or othering terms that one could be subjected to, I do not expect myself or anyone really to identify completely with any of these listed terms. At best they are all provisional bases from which to navigate towards an understanding of an intersectional identity as a result of various forms of oppression caused by racist, ethnocentric, neoliberal, patriarchal, heteronormative, and neo-colonial dynamics.  

My works thus act as counter movements to displacement and become the place or stage where resistance to marginalization is verbalized and recognized. Since monuments have long been erected to honour and glorify conquest, a dilemma arises with regards to how one can best monumentalize a shameful and traumatic subject without seeming to celebrate it. So rather than glorify the subject, I problematize it, believing that a face to face encounter is the ultimate confrontation, despite the amount of distress I feel.