Delhi Photo Festival 2015: Nadine Stijns’s "A Nation Outside a Nation" series

My partner is Filipino-American and for years I watched the small-scale migrations among his family in California and the Philippines. These patterns are both visible and invisible: gifts are sent in gigantic boxes, money is returned and invested, new formations of friends and family are established in a foreign land, while Skype buzzes in the background with the sounds of home.

How can I capture the memories, the dreams and the flow of capital and possessions throughout the Filipino Diaspora?

The Balikbayan Box, goods sent by Filipino migrants free of tax back to the Philippines, is an ideal symbol of my interest in the tangible and intangible experiences of labour migration. The box is more than foreign gifts and supplies; it’s an act of giving, an offering and a sign of new possibilities.

Nadine Stijns’ work has developed from multidisciplinary collaborative projects in the realm of design, fashion and autonomous art, toward a documentary nature in recent times. She constantly looks for a visual language that best suits the story at that time; a method she translates to exhibitions, larger than life pictures, loose posters, maps and spatial installations. Because of this way of working, her presentations are often site-specific.