Remittance Givers
2025 | A.I.R. Gallery | USA
Materials: Found luggage, acrylic paint, artist’s handwoven net with indigo dye, and 38 air-dry clay casts of artist’s hand
Dimensions: Varies
Date: 2025
In Remittance Givers, 38 disembodied cast hands spill from a luggage bag, one for every billion dollars sent home. Each hand gestures to offer, beg, or surrender, expressing how their act of giving is tethered to histories of dispossession.
Overseas Filipino workers are often called bagong bayani because their remittances support their families and help sustain the Philippine economy. In 2024 alone, OFWs sent back 38 billion USD to their families: a record high. While this label honors the sacrifices of OFWs, it also obscures the underlying forces that make their migration inevitable. Remittances are celebrated as signs of “resilience” rather than understood as symptoms of socioeconomic insecurity shaped by colonial histories. In glorifying their sacrifices, we risk normalizing the racialized and gendered labor hierarchies and the everyday risks of exploitation that they face. In the process, we lose sight of the deeply unequal global labor systems that create these conditions in the first place.