This piece speaks to the struggles and brutality that migrants endure while crossing borders in search of a new and better life. 

Through the use of wood panels, discarded wooden strips, and overlapping muslin fabric, I have visually recreated my recent experience crossing the Dominico-Haitian Northern border to visit my Haitian homeland. My first experience with the concept of migration was through listening to stories from my paternal grand-uncle as he shared his experiences about passing through the Dominico-Haitian border in search of employment and a better life. Unluckily, the only work he could find was as a temp worker at the Dominican sugar factories where he faced hardships and other atrocities similar to colonial slavery. More than three decades later as I passed through that same border back into my Haitian homeland, I am left to ponder the multifaceted struggles of migrants on a global scale.

Paint brushes and a Rigwaz (Haitian word for whip) were used to create expressive textures and marks to represent the daily vicissitudes at the border. Historically, a rigwaz was a torturing device created by the French colonists to beat and control their slaves. Unfortunately in the 21st century, it is still used in Haiti as a method of corporal punishment against anyone who causes any disorder at the Dominico-Haitian border.

collection of works by Kim Maxime Baglieri

The title of this collection of works refers to 1) “philippinitis”, a condition suffered by American colonial forces of the United States occupation of the Philippines (1898-1940) and 2) puhon, the native Waray word meaning “Divine timing”. 

During the US colonial occupation of the Philippines, American officials were documented in medical literature as developing tropical neurasthenia, a condition characterized by the decomposing of colonial white masculinities, the “corroding” of their brains and nervous systems, due to the humid tropical climate and sensorial experience of life in the islands. Despite white American males' self-importance as agents of civilization and the imperial program, “philippinitis” was common among them and formally recognized after 1898. In their journals, many colonial officials blamed the unrelenting heat and humidity for the breakdown of their rationality and virility.  Echoing sentiments by eugenicists, Colonel Major Charles E. Woodruff, M.D. wrote “Low tropical savages are the fittest for their environment, and the strenuous white man is the unfit.” Even those amongst the colonial medical community skeptical of the most extreme accounts of “philippinitis” came to admit its limitations and dangers on their “hopes for permanent White Americans control of the tropics.”  

This collection of work decolonizes “Philippinitis” and imagines that in accordance with the Waray belief in diwata (that can be translated to forest-guardian spirit-relative), in an act of resistance, Mother Earth and the diwata bewitched those who aimed to control and tame her. In Waray cosmology forest and forest beings are considered kin, the words for old person and forest having the same root. Juxtaposed with the word Puhon (Divine timing) these works contextualize horrors of colonialism and neo-colonialism alongside this current moment of the Islander diaspora reclaiming their prehispanic customs, rituals, languages, and place-relations and (re)learning from their bodies, ancestors, elders, language concepts, and culturally indigenous relatives.

In these works I combine elements from the places that I have been in relation with- whether via ancestry or within Lenapehoking, my adopted home, provoking a question of what decolonization looks like based on one’s positionality. I dedicate these works to Eva Apolinar Calleja, my maternal grandmother.