#ResidencyInsights: Geography, Identification, Materiality - Notes from a Work in Progress (Albert Garcia)

This project began with geography. Not as a backdrop, but as a condition.

In late 2023, I went to Mai Po, the wetland reserve in Yuen Long, Hong Kong. A place known for biodiversity, migratory routes, regulated access. It was there that I encountered fireflies—not as spectacle, but as presence. Their flickering felt like a language I could not yet understand. Something between signal and disappearance.

Geography is never neutral. Mai Po is protected land, surveilled land, land with permissions and prohibitions. As someone born and raised in Macao to Filipino migrant parents—undocumented for most of my life—I have lived inside another kind of regulated terrain. Papers, statuses, names. Allowed and not allowed. Seen and unseen.

“The Bug is On Fire” began as an attempt to think through this parallel: fireflies and migrant workers. Both subject to intervention. Both romanticized and erased. Both flickering in and out of visibility within systems that decide who gets to glow and who gets to disappear.

In September 2024, during our residency at PACT Zollverein in Essen, everything felt new to me. Gathering. Convening. Holding space. Sensing collectively. I had collaborated before, but this was different. It was not about directing toward a product; it was about configuring a shared field of attention. Collaboration here was not efficiency—it was generative friction. Alone, I often feel the need to prove productivity. Together, productivity dissolved into process.

We began to trace stories of fireflies alongside accounts of disappeared migrant workers. Urbanization, land regulations, labor precarity. The first iteration emerged at the end of that residency. It was fragile, but possible.

After Germany, the work traveled with me to the Philippines. This felt necessary. I have mostly shown work in Hong Kong and Macao. But this piece speaks directly to Filipino migrant experiences. I realized I carried a habitual instinct: to ask for permission. Years of navigating bureaucracy had trained me to seek validation before occupying space. I felt I needed to show the work to Filipinos—not only as audience, but as witnesses who could say: yes, this resonates, or no, this is not ours.

So I began sharing the work across different regions in the Philippines. In libraries. By the beach. In someone’s living room. In a backyard garden in the Cordilleras. In independent art spaces where some people had never encountered performance before. Geography shifted again. The work reorganized itself depending on where it landed.

And yet, alongside the sense of momentum, a quiet guilt surfaced.

The project was “successful.” We were invited. Supported. Visible. But had I given back to the fireflies accordingly? Had I rightfully asked permission to enter their world? To use their image? To draw parallels between their fragile ecologies and human displacement?

This is where materiality entered more sharply.

We began asking: what does it mean to capture a firefly with a camera? Technically, it is extremely difficult. Their glow resists documentation. The sensor struggles. The image blurs or fails. The camera demands a certain kind of light; the firefly offers another.

What is the violence—or the care—within that attempt to record?

Our collaboration deepened around this question. Instead of only representing fireflies, we started examining the apparatus itself. The lens. The digital sensor. The technological desire to fix what flickers. We began considering the full scope of senses beyond the visual.  What if the work did not try to capture the glow, but to situate bodies in the conditions that make glowing possible?

Eventually, we invited a urban ritualist to join us. If we were speaking of permission, reciprocity, and unseen presences, we needed tools beyond dramaturgy and theory. Through ritual, we digested and reconfigured the material. We asked not only how to show the fireflies, but how to be with them.

When PACT invited us again for the IMPACT gathering, it felt less like recognition and more like responsibility. A space to rethink, gather, and share unfinished thoughts with others who are also negotiating how art circulates, who it serves, and what it extracts.

This work remains in progress. It encourages addition, repurposing, reorganization. It resists closure. Collaboration continues to undo my individual anxieties about legitimacy and productivity. 

I am still asking:
Can a performance flicker without capturing?