Film Screening: Diwata (2024)

Giulia Casalini will introduce the film, Diwata, 2024 by artists Ram Botero & Giulia Casalini. 

This film screening is for all attendees as part of the introductory session on Day 1 of the January Congress. 

Whilst you are welcome to book a space on Inkpath if you would like to formally record your attendance, this is not mandatory as this is a core activity of the overall event.

About the work:

Diwata is a project exploring precolonial Philippine mythology from a contemporary, ecotransfeminist lens. Engaging with notions of gender and ecology through a spiritually anitist lens (anito being the locally specific nature spirits), Diwata introduces three manifestations of the divine: Dalikmata, Magindara, and Tara. The three goddess-avatars are the guardian spirits of nature that have materialised to the project’s co-creatrix and performer, Ram Botero, though her engagement with various aspects of Philippines’ histories, political ecologies, indigenous belief systems and practices. These diwatas are composite of (at times contrasting, at time complimentary) histories, storytelling and iconologies that are assembled through Ram’s unique perspective as a transgender Filipina artist, researcher and socially and environmentally engaged activist growing up in the rural Philippines. In this performance for camera, the diwatas appear in three different ecologies of Mindanao, near Ram’s birthplace.

The all-seeing, all-sensing Dalikmata inhabits the forests and has the capacity to transform in flowers, birds or butterflies; the morning dew are her tears, and her eyes are everywhere in nature, observing human actions. Magindara – a name known for being the one of a sea siren – in this tale is a half-human, half-reptilian diwata that inhabits rivers and marshlands (since there is no direct access to the sea from the hinterland, where Ram grew up in); her incarnation has been inspired by the sacred crocodile-Manobo relationship in Mindanao’s Agusan Marsh. Tara is the incarnation of the homonymous golden statue that was found in 1917 in the banks of Wawa river (later purchased by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History); the statue is said to be the image of a ‘bodhisattva’ of Buddhist-Hindu tradition, which was worshipped by indigenous communities as an anito. The pre-Christian connections to Buddhist-Hindu belief systems can also be found in the use of the word ‘diwata’ itself, derived from Sanskrit ‘deva’ (i.e. divine being).  

FILM DETAIL: 

Artist Name: Ram Botero & Giulia Casalini
Performance and concept: Ram Botero
Curation and film direction: Giulia Casalini
Filming and editing: Wowa Medroso.
Mentorship and filming: Niya B
Costumes: Gem Botero
Sound design: Joee Mejias
Props and assistance: Art Alferez and Faye Marie Alferez

From an original idea by Ram Botero and Giulia Casalini.
A photographic version of the project Diwata was realised in 2021 by Renz Y. Botero, Natu Xantino and Ram Botero.

Medium: Single-channel video (4K). Performance for camera.

About the Artists:

GIULIA CASALINI is an independent curator-artist and transfeminist community organiser based in London. She has just completed a PhD analysing queer-trans-feminist live art from transnational perspectives, in an attempt to decentre Euro-Anglo-American aesthetic canons and discourses. Her writing practice is based on embodied responses to the artists’ works and uses a ‘deep sensing’ method to understand their singular perspectives beyond linguistic articulations. As a curator, her methods have been reflecting upon the ethics of care and co-creation, with translocal and transnational queer community-building as her objective. Her practice spans from institutional to alternative spaces, with a focus on performance, audience participation and engagements across diverse communities.  
 
Selected curatorial projects: Burned House Horizon (Mimosa House, London, 2025) #WIP (Queer Art Projects, online, 2020); EcoFutures (multi-venue festival, London, 2019); Still Burning (Konsthalle, Varberg, 2019); Transitional States (touring, including Peltz Gallery, London and CCCB, Barcelona, 2017-18); Transformer (Richard Saltoun, London, 2014). Recent talks/workshops: Tate (UK, 2022); Bitef Festival (Belgrade, Serbia, 2021); Centrale Fies (Dro, Italy, 2021). She has published in both peer-reviewed academic journals (e.g. Contemporary Theatre Review, Technoethics, Media-N), art magazines (e.g. La Quadriennale di Roma, MACRO Roma) and more popular outlets (e.g. Tinig UK). She has been co-founder and artistic director of the non-profit arts organisation Arts Feminism Queer (aka CUNTemporary, 2012-2021), and the founder of Archivio Queer Italia (2014-2017). She sits on the advisory board of Mimosa House gallery (London) and is a Live Art Associate UK. 
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+ Film maker: RAM BOTERO

RAM BOTERO is an artist, writer, cultural worker, community facilitator and filmmaker from Mindanao, Philippines. In 2019, she directed the film Pamalugu (In Limbo), which has been screened internationally (Fukuoka Independent Film Festival, 2021), and at several national film festival – earning accolades at the 2019 editions of the Ngilngig Asian Fantastic Film Festival and Festival de Cine Paz Zamboanga. She is currently in the production stages of her forthcoming film Eksotik (2024). Ram is one of the artists behind the photographic project ‘Diwata: Queering Pre-Colonial Philippine Mythology’, commissioned by the 2021 Southeast Asian Queer Cultural Festival, and exhibited in Fukuoka, Japan, later that same year. Ram’s essay ‘Of Myths and Goddesses: The Trans Voice in Art and Feminist Spaces’ was published in Archival Glitch, a collection of lectures by feminist artists in Asia and the Pacific. She has recently produced the performance for camera ‘Siren’s Song’ for the European Capital of Culture (Elefsina, Greece, 2023).