This project begins with refusal and spite – the refusal to confess, to perform, to be legible. In Filipino Disneyland, a confessional booth becomes an inverted theatre of devotion. The viewer is drawn into dialogue with a digital presence, unsure who is confessing to whom. Here, material and machine mirror the diasporic body – porous, translated, constantly in flux. What remains is the residue of encounter – the uneasy beauty of being seen by what you thought was seeing you. Wag mo akong tingnan. It transforms the viewer into participant, destablising the power of the passive gaze. The booth becomes analogue for the witness – where speech is coerced, silence amplified, and authorship redistributed.
By framing the work as an anti-theme park, I question how environments manufacture belief. Disneyland sells fantasy through control and illusion. “Disneyland is presented as imagniary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality but of conceiling the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle” Jean Baudillard, Simulacra and Simulation. I point to the shared logic between postcolonial mimicry and corporate spectacle – both are acts of world building under power. Yet, in this booth – the manufactured skin and plastic led lights become declarations of agency, a refusal to disappear quietly. A meditation on place-making as performance, on how fantasy becomes a form of survival.
Today I see baby chicks. Pink, yellow, Green and Blue bodies squirm against the bars. I choose the orange one. The spray paint has already coated its lungs. It might live three or four days. I hope I live forever to sell you my confessions.
Lance Zuniga is a Filipino-New Zealand artist whose practice investigates the material, visual, and semiotic dimensions of diasporic experience through the intersections of postcolonial critique. Rejecting the inherited euro-centric authority of the stretched canvas, he turned to liquid latex, employing processes of casting and imprinting. In this continual act of reconfiguration, Zuniga’s practice inhabits the tension between disappearance and declaration, finding agency within the unstable skin of diaspora.
