A thousand splendid feet and a swarm of fortune
Cross-disciplinary artist, TV director, and documentary filmmaker Jazel Kristin’s 2022 Koganecho Artist Residency project ties together themes of wonder and re-examination.
Words Pao Vergara
March 18, 2024
JK A THOUSAND FEETS the great takeover 1
Like many of us, Jazel Kristin was creeped out and queasy when a millipede decided to visit her room as she packed clothes enough for three months. Arriving in Koganecho, Yokohama, Japan, she was hoping for some respite before starting work when three millipedes showed up. During succeeding days, millipedes kept showing up in the artist’s room. It’s like they followed from Manila, she thought. To face her fear somewhat, she researched about them, first reading up on their ecological place in the web of life, and even their esoteric meaning across spiritual and cultural traditions. She then came across a news report from the 1920s about how a train in Japan had to stop on its tracks when the railway was blocked by a swarm of millipedes.
After these learnings, Jazel saw millipedes as the stomach of the earth, breaking down detritus and returning nutrients to the soil. She noted how many cultures also consider millipedes as omens of good fortune—a far, far cry from the revulsion moderns feel when one visits.
“As someone whose subject matter for the longest time has been food, I’ve gained a new appreciation for the little crawlies, my ‘milli-team.’ If not for them, we won’t have the fresh, nutritious eats I so often hunt for during my solo travels,” Jazel expounds.
JK A THOUSAND FEETS navigating the maze
Taking photos of food is one of the most common habits of our mobile internet era of 24/7 connectivity to an omniscient cloud of data, information, and distraction. For Kristin, the act of photographing her food is also an effort at getting a tangible memory of the places she’s visited, a kind of self-induced Marcel Proust Moment, if you may.
An avid solo traveler outside of work, Jazel believes “food is a wordless expression of a locale’s culture. You can’t intellectualize it, you can write essays and photograph it all you want, but tasting it is the only way to really know it.”
Jazel Kristin
Millipedes and food, an unlikely tandem, even if ecologically intimate (the digestor? The digestee?) thus became the subjects of A Thousand Feet, her culminating project for her three-month Koganecho Artist Residency Program in 2022.
Far from an academic, botanical portrayal, Jazel depicted the crawlies as cute, magical, and companion-like, likening them to the many cute critters that populate Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki films.
She cut up some of her printed food photos into the shapes of millipedes. She made many. A swarm. Like the one that stopped that train on its tracks.
JK A THOUSAND FEETS behindthescene
The millipedes then populated her canvasses and beyond. Resin sculptures where some millipedes sunk to the bottom as their siblings floated to the top. A photo collage of a Yokohama neighborhood skyline where a huge millipede snakes through the buildings, entering the window of the apartment Jazel lived and then exiting through the other window, continuing its wandering through the urban jungle. Sushi plates serving millipedes, and, in Gravity Art Space (like in Koganecho) sticky tack on the walls, a stash of millipedes, and an invite to visitors to “take a ‘pede and stick them to a designated wall.”
She recounts how, in both Yokohama and Manila, people came to help at the right time at the most crucial moments in mounting each iteration of her magical-crawly show. Koganecho actually fell like manna from heaven. She didn’t apply, but was recommended to the Residency alongside another Filipino artist by cultural-work couple Mark Salvatus and Mayumi Hirano of Load na Dito Projects.
JK Koganecho Artist Residency Japan
Her free spirit was born and nourished at home as the daughter of a photographer couple. Her other sibling is also a professional photographer. She and her siblings would get “free photography workshops” every weekend. Initially, as a young adult, she felt the need to distance herself from the family’s chosen medium, choosing film and TV as her profession, starting with her internship at the Probe docuseries team (Probe Productions) in GMA-7 before becoming a director, working with Howie Severino and others in investigative and magazine programs like I-Witness.
“Eventually, I came home to photography.” She felt the need to “create for myself. While I love working with a team, there’s a part of me that wants to do pure personal expression.” She realized this behind-the-scenes at shoots and fieldwork, as she was taking photos of the crew, of the stories and narratives behind the televised narrative.
Many of her art projects were thus photo collages. Film was the common medium then and after developing her rolls, she’d cut the photos up – of food from her travels, of her colleagues – and mix and match them, creating new narratives, alternate universes.
JK A THOUSAND FEETS artworks
Her nature was challenged then refined by Koganecho, as the people there did things differently from what she was comfortable with. “I was a free-spirited Filipina arriving in Koganecho. Yokohama changed me, but I think I changed Yokohama too. I needed the structure but I believe my spontaneity also changed them.”
She recalls disagreements on how her work should be displayed, but they eventually agreed, and it became a main draw to that year’s culminating exhibit. She recalls how a visitor shared that “I like how you see my country.”
Food and solo travel and chance encounters, moments of light shared with strangers, which reveal that past one’s ego, well into humanity, and well into communion, there are no strangers. And yet, the masks are always slipped back on, masks which we need in order to function in society, in civilization.
At least millipedes don’t wear masks, happily chomping away. And it seems they followed her from Manila to Yokohama and back. “Your presence,” Jazel smiles, “can be a present.”
Visit the milli-team at Jazel’s Instagram account @jkartalyer.
