Remittance Givers

2025 | A.I.R. Gallery | USA

Overseas workers are often called bagong bayani because their remittances support their families and help sustain the Philippine economy. While this label honors the sacrifices of OFWs, it also obscures the underlying forces that make their migration inevitable. Remittances are celebrated as signs of “resilience” rather than understood as symptoms of socioeconomic insecurity shaped by colonial histories. In glorifying their sacrifices, we risk normalizing the racialized and gendered labor hierarchies and the everyday risks of exploitation that they face. In the process, we lose sight of the deeply unequal global labor systems that create these conditions in the first place.

In Remittance Givers, disembodied cast hands spill from a luggage bag. 38 open-handed gestures suggest offering, begging, or surrendering. Spilling violently from the luggage, the hands insist on acknowledging what the bagong bayani narrative obscures: that each act of giving is tethered to histories of dispossession and uneven global capitalist systems.