We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Thea Jhem Dakila a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Thea Jhem, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

The first project that comes to mind is a video titled ‘Je Te Lasserai’ (“I’ll Leave You”).

For this piece I reached out to former friends, family members, and a handful of strangers. I asked that they send me a video of them saying the words “I Love You’ followed by the words ‘I’ll Leave You’. When mouthed, the phrases look the same.

It’s made up of a compilation of clips from my camera roll that date back to 2012. Then I used the video recordings of everyone saying ‘I’ll Leave You’ as transitionary cuts, dubbed over by their “I Love You’s’ to make it seem like they were confessing that instead.

I think of the Pablo Neruda quote from his last piece in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair; ‘Es tan corto al amor, y es tan largo el olvido.’ (Love is so short, forgetting is so long).

This project holds a lot of weight to me because I’ve been told I forget a lot; I forget so easily.. I forget because it feels safe, and I forget because it hurts less than remembering. Until it doesn’t. When looking back at old photos and videos my own memory cheats me; I hold only Love when I look back at anything, even if Love didn’t exist in those moments.

Someone I Love once told me that moving on is remembering; I believe them now.

I owe heaps of gratitude to artist Patrick Watson, who wrote the backtrack which helped me set the mood and direction for this project, titled ‘Je te laisserai des mots’,

to all the people who took a vulnerable moment to say I Love/I’ll Leave You,
to Josean for the outro thumb war in front of TV static and our once tender tug-of-war in real life,
to John Michael for being my first escapade chauffeur and the catalyst for many endless impulsive road trips,

and to Masun for being the Someone I Love.

Thea Jhem, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a Visual Artist, a Performance Artist, and a Curator.

I do live action expressions, that I perform myself, that are usually filmed by someone worth putting trust into.

I also like to film other people and collect all those videos to eventually curate into a full-on showcase for anybody who is looking to share a cathartic space. 

I can help you get out of your head about symbolism and cleanliness if you want me to. Nothing means anything if it means everything to you, and only you.

I’ve had a love for nostalgia and preservation of raw feeling since I first discovered the stacks of VCR’s and family photo albums that my mother kept hoarded in my childhood bedroom. I remember asking mommy who all these people that looked like us were. Coming from a family of 15+ Filipino tiyo’s and tiya’s, 70 cousins and then some, and an older brother I never got to meet; It’s strange how blood can be more unfamiliar than a Publix cashier.

I create things that make me feel good but mostly what helps me understand why I feel bad. When you grow up in a space where showing emotions is a sign of weakness you have to learn how to express in ways that are not harmful, and maybe expressing through art is the only way you know how to feel out loud. I think every piece should start from a place of personal catharsis but end in what you want a viewer to leave with.

and the viewer is everyone. Not just the people that make you feel seen.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

A friend once told me to let art be the homeless holy saint. And I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

It’s easy to be novel and expensive. You just have to believe that you are enough that other people do.

It’s difficult to connect in a way that sticks both ways. When a connection happens only one way, it’s a short cut, and it’s delusional.

You can focus on semantics so much that you lose meaning and forget who’s in front of you. 

What drives me is maybe 5 things this year.

Genuineness

Vulnerability

Eye contact 

Love

and knowing that you don’t have anything if you don’t have truth when you look into a mirror.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

When in school for art, you’re taught all the basics. You’re taught how to use Adobe Programs, clean up discrepancies, color correct, how to change settings on a film or digital camera so often that it becomes muscle memory, or maybe even a tick. tick tick tick. 

but I get it now, when you find yourself in a grey whirlpool lack of meaning you have to remind yourself that you have to master the basics in order to unlearn the basics.

Shock value and messiness and disruption is cool but, even those things you get tired of if you don’t remember what you’re fighting in the first place.

I had to unlearn how to control the pretty factor, and the thought to produce as often as I breathe or else, I don’t exist. That tick is something that I like to notice, but nowadays I find myself battling it more than I am drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Breathing is just as important as creating, if you are someone who doesn’t think that two are the same thing.

The more I dig into different kinds of people, the more I realize on the inside we’re all just as scared. It’s okay to capture that, it’s okay to share that, and it doesn’t have to be digestible for all, because what is?

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.pradothebravado.art/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tay_dakilla/