'Haunt Me, Recite It Again' is an experimental narrative film that mixes documentary and fiction genres as a means of expressing the latent tension to political and social realities. It is structured around a protagonist reminiscing events that occurred in her life, and mapping out the emotional resonance within the complexities of neo-colonial vices, globalization and her search for connection with her native roots within the modern world.
It is a voyage into an elderly woman's stream of thought, as she recites her memories about living in the Philippines. The elderly woman is the artist's lola, Melissa spent 2 months beside her lola, conversing, listening to the gaps between her words as much the words themselves.
'Haunt Me, Recite It Again' juxtapose text, images & sound to call on unformulated history and instead evoke subterranean individual & cultural embodied memories, knowledge and experience. Beginning from the inability to speak, the artwork's audio-visual language uses silence and perspective blurring between scenes to express the artist's process in locating cultural memory between the gaps of recorded history.
This work was developed during an Artist in Residency at GreenPapayaArtProjects 2010-2011
Exhibition: Feb 2011. Greenpapaya Art Projects, MANILA, PHILIPPINES
Exhibition: "Inner Voices" July-Nov 2011. 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, KANAZAWA, JAPAN. ARTIST TALK for "Inner Voices" Exhibition:
Short Film Screening: 26th-30th October 2011. Berlin Asia Film Festival
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin
Nothing to Declare - Exhibition
Manila, Philippines
18th November - 29th January 2012
Vargas Museum & Yuchengco Museum
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