I use photography to negotiate with inheritance: familial, cultural, decolonial, and ancestral.
My practice is rooted in futurism and operates retrocausally.
The future self looks back.
Written and directed by: Kidlat Tahimik
Cinematography: Boy Yniguez
The archive reaches forward. Working through counter-archive, I treat the photographic object
as talismanic: charged with ancestral presence.
reflecting, san ramon (2026) 35mm
Pagkakatanda / As I Recollect the Past (2022) is a triple-exposure self-portrait shaped by temporal collapse. Inspired by Chris Marker’s La Jetée, I place myself as the traveler — a future self returning to witness a past self at the threshold of family immigration. My eyes are closed, not in absence but in interiority, holding the psychological landscape of what was lost, what was carried, and what is still becoming. The layered face is not singular but multiple: who I was, who I am becoming, and everything displaced in between.
Yolanda (1993) turns outward toward land. A family archive photograph of my immigrant mother seated at Glacier Point, Half Dome rising behind her, is housed within a blush agate frame. She sits on her own terms inside one of the most photographed landscapes in American history. The agate is not decorative. It is earth holding earth — a gesture of respect for Awahnichi and Southern Sierra Miwok land. Where Ansel Adams commanded the landscape with a large format camera, my mother simply sat. That too is a form of sovereignty.
Panaginip ng Amerika / An American Dream (2023) reconstructs the American flag from 24 Instax film scans — prints arranged into formation then dragged across the flatbed during exposure, creating the illusion of a waving flag. Personal photographs of life in Northern California as a Filipino immigrant living within the natural and man-made American landscape. Each photograph becomes a fragment, a portal, a living record. In conversation with Robert Frank's The Americans and Ronald Takaki's A Larger Memory, the work does not dismantle the dream but holds it open for examination.
This counter-archival practice extends into time-based work. Flora (2022) is composed from 35mm photographs my mother made in her 20s in the Philippines before immigrating to America — laid across a flatbed scanner, overlapping and partially concealed, some images duplicated, others lost beneath the surface of the scan. The gesture enacts what memory itself does: reveal and obscure simultaneously. A life before migration becomes visible and irretrievable at once.
Jimi’s Prayer (22:22, 2026) is a visual compilation where looking becomes a form of prayer. The land holds memory. So do we. These works are navigation — through the Unreality States of America, toward ancestral tending. For the revolutionary thinkers, the dreamers, the faithful, the graceful, the tragic & the classic.
I am a Filipino American artist based in Oakland. I hold a BFA in Photography with High Distinction and a minor in Literature from California College of the Arts (2023). I was selected as a 2026 AVA Lab artist at Kearny Street Workshop. My first solo exhibition, Temple of the Filipinx Diaspora, was presented at Bituin Studio in San Francisco (2025–2026).