Intended to portray "domesticity and diasporic intimacy," Jill’s video work "Caregiver" (Mothering from a Distance) is another potent study on the notion of distance as a means to attend to the sentimental, in-between relationships and attachments across time and geographies. Through a raw visual style reminiscent of multiple desktop windows playing moving images simultaneously, Jill plays again with fragmentation as a visual motif to record the performative exercise of "caregiving" through repetitions and layerings of routines, gestures, behaviors, actions, and movements, intertwined with the anonymity of characters and itinerant contexts. “Caregiver” is a packet of video clips rendered as multiple windows to the liminal, uniquely curated to be perceived distantly as a mise en scène, persisting to evoke the profound importance of vulnerability to give and accept care in some of the most challenging and yet transformative situations in our lives.
- essay excerpt from Project Space Pilipinas
Caregiver (Mothering from a Distance), 2022 is a desktop video collage that consists of interlapping browser windows of my mother’s caregiver performing daily and repetitive tasks of care. I was seeking to make a portrait of domesticity and diasporic intimacy. In the process of making this video, I was also asking myself: How do our personal devices—our smartphones, iPads, computers, act as a prosthetic device that connects us to our most intimate relationships?
Since returning to the Philippines over 5 years ago, I often get asked the question ‘Why did you move back to Manila?’ The simple response is that I wanted to be near my aging mother. In being a close proximity to her, the emotional toll it took fell not only on me, but on the women who take care of her each and every day. For my mother’s caregivers, the practice of mothering from a distance is intertwined with current everyday technologies from Bailkbayan boxes and long distance phone calls, to more recent technologies offered by social media apps and Zoom video calls. As an immigrant and a Balikbayan, I have relied on translocal technologies, to stay connected to family in Manila while growing up in North America, and now that I live in Manila, the vice-versa is true.
1. “It’s the biggest driver of inequality that nobody talks about: The caregiving burden falls almost completely on the shoulders of women,” said Ai-jen Poo, co-founder and executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group. Bhattarai, Abha, “Caring for aging parents, sick spouses is keeping millions out of work”, Washington Post, April 4, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/04/04/caregiving-economy-adults-work/?
2. “Without a doubt, mothering from a distance has emotional ramifications both for mothers who leave and children who are sent back or left behind. The pain of family separation creates various feelings including helplessness, regret, and guilt for mothers and loneliness, vulnerability, and insecurity for children. How are these feelings negotiated in the social reproduction of the transnational family? Moreover, how are these feelings influences by gender ideologies of mothering?”
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar, “Feminist Studies, Mothering from a Distance: Emotions, Gender, and Intergenerational Relations in Filipino Transnational Families”, Feminist Studies, Inc. Vol. 2, No, 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 361-390, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178765?origin=JSTOR-pdf
3. “This imagined global community is constituted by circuits like those identified by Roger Rouse as tying together sending and receiving communities of migration into a singular community through the ‘continuous circulation of people, money, goods, and information’
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar, Transgressing the Nation-States: The Partial Citizenship and “Imagined (Global) Community” of Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers, Signs, Vol. 26, No.4, Globalization and Gender (Summer, 2001), pp. 1129-1154, The University of Chicago Press
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar, “Transgressing the Nation-States: The Partial Citizenship and “Imagined (Global) Community” of Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers”, Signs, Vol. 26, No.4, Globalization and Gender (Summer, 2001), pp. 1129-1154, The University of Chicago Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3175359