Brandon Braza and the art of being left behind
"What is the modern Negrense family?" Curator Georgina Luisa Jocson posed this question to the 17 artists participating in an ongoing show at Orange Project, Bacolod City. In one painting, a family poses in front of a church, the children sporting tattoos and cropped tops. In a deeply personal collage, cyanotype prints of family life are layered over divorce and annulment papers. A young woman smiles next to what is now the cutout of a man, his identity erased.
I had almost finished walking through the show when a pile of luggage made me pause. The show was filled with paintings, making this installation stark—confronting. The luggage looked worn. Some pieces lay haphazardly on the floor. Some, suspended on a wall, appeared to fall —as though the pile could not bear more weight. “Bagahe,” says the wall label.
I recalled Imelda Cajipe-Endaya’s work The Wife is a DH—where, rather than a torso, a body contains a suitcase. Inside it are objects that evoke the grueling labor of migrant domestic workers: an iron, a broom, a coconut husk used to polish floors. For decades, poverty and unemployment have pushed millions of Filipinos to find work abroad. Many hope to give their families back home a better, stabler life. Employing motifs like the suitcase and balikbayan box, contemporary artists like Cajipe-Endaya expose these workers’ long-unseen plight.
Yet, as I learned more about Bagahe, it struck me—rarely do I see such works made from the perspective of the child left behind. The artist is Bacolod-based Brandon Braza, 22. His father was a seafarer, who lived away for 25 years.
An old airplane seat is installed beside the luggage. The work, my tour guide tells me, is interactive. I sit down, turn to the simulated plane window on the right, and hold up a lens. Images and letters float across the sky—snippets of life that Braza’s mother would send his father. Baby pictures. A wedding reception. “We missed you so much.”
I felt my eyes well up. I had just left home for a writer’s residency that day, but my excitement was tinged with melancholy as I anticipated being away from my husband, whom I just married, for three weeks. I could barely imagine a month away from him. A quarter century was unbearable.
“I want the audience to feel what I think my father would feel while flying abroad,” Braza tells me. The work “is like carrying the whole home with you, carrying the whole family with you, even though you are away.”
As a child, Braza thought it was normal to have an absent father. Most of his classmates had parents that were also overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). Then he began attending seminars for OFW children, and he saw that his family was different. “Why wouldn’t a child of a police or a doctor go to a seminar about their parents’ job?”
His father would visit home for a few months every year. When it would be time to leave again, Braza would watch as his father packed his bags.
My tour guide opens one of the luggage pieces suspended on the wall, and inside it is a piece of a pillar, its rusty metal rods crudely sticking out. Braza evokes the term haligi ng tahanan. “I feel like when my dad left, he also carried a part of the structure of our house,” says Braza. Without it, he says, the home became unstable.
Another bag is suspended beside the one with the pillar. This time, it’s open—its contents spread out for audiences to see: A Barbie doll. Makeup. A necklace with a half-heart pendant. At first, I thought that these were things Braza’s father would bring home to his family. Pasalubong, perhaps, that one could not find in Bacolod. Yet, I quickly learned that these were the objects Braza would play with growing up—objects that he hid from his father.
Braza hadn’t come out to him. But sometimes his father would rummage through his things, and confront him about them the day after. “He may have been carrying his own baggage, but these are my baggage.”
As a child, Braza felt his father’s love through the material things he would give him. But as he grew older, something was lacking.
“Because he wasn’t here during my childhood, we weren’t able to build a bond together, and maybe it’s hard for the both of us to tell (each other) what we really feel. There’s just a barrier between us... and it’s been difficult for us to communicate with each other.”
“My father sacrificed his connections with us in order for us to survive,” says Braza. His father now lives with them at home—but even if he is physically there, Braza still can’t feel that bond.
He isn’t alone. Other OFW children describe feeling a wall between them and their parents, comprehending the magnitude of their sacrifice only when they grow older. Some spend their adulthood making up for that lost time with their parents. For others, the relationship stays distant.
The power of Braza’s work lies in how he viscerally communicates this tension. During the pandemic, he began working with found objects, diving into the things in his home. These objects consequently hold a sense of rawness. They are visibly old and used. They feel deeply personal, as if straight out of a memory. Yet, more than displaying these objects, Braza gives them new life, new histories. He encourages viewers to touch, to sit, to see. We become part of their story as he implores us to feel, albeit for a moment, what he feels. Emotions shared by millions, but so rarely expressed.
Braza did not have much release for his anger or sadness as a child. Now that he is an artist, he keeps coming back to his childhood. He sees his art as a way to express what he could not back then—a way for him to heal.
Braza grew up watching his dad pack his things and go. Now, he lays down his own bags, showing us what it means to unpack.