Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. The artists occasionally appear together in the work—dancing across a dusky shoreline or sharing a candlelit kamayan feast with collaborators who recount superstitions and stories around a Buwaya sculpted from rice. These scenes weave historical accounts of the Babaylan—queer and trans shamans who mediate between physical and spiritual realms—with precolonial animist affinities to the ancestral Buwaya and Kinnari (bird) in Philippine mythology. ANG IDOL KO casts these figures as kindred spirits in their vision of “queer, trans, and animist idols for today.” This work refines Club Ate’s shimmering ecology of future folklore, revisiting ideas that have informed their practice from the outset.
The collective formed in 2014 after Shoulder and, Tagalog for “big sister,” the event was intergenerational and family-oriented, with a focus on connecting queer, Asia-Pacific, and particularly Filipinx communities. “There weren’t a lot of those types of gatherings, especially of people of color,” said Ra. “It was a first for us to explore our Philippine lineage as a framework for event making.”
