Jay Albaos Paningkamot Pagpadayon ang Paglupad (PPaP) // An Attempt to not Lose Flight: Segments 1 and 2

Can you describe your research project?

PPaP: Segments 1 and 2 are among the artwork pivots of my doctoral research (entitled, Negotiating at the Gates of Flemish Belgian “Migrant Integration”: Rhetoric, Bodies, and Performance). Both durational in form, PPaP: Segments 1 and 2 are performances on becoming, attempting to flight, on collecting what is needed to soar, on utilizing the collaborative and humane tool which I call ‘active kindness’.

PPaP Segment 1 was the first public performance at specific sites in Flemish Belgium where I went to collect answers to the question: “If you had to leave Belgium today, what is one thing you would bring to help you continue becoming who you are?” For five sessions in respective sites, passersby were invited to write a single word on a paper feather, speak it into a microphone, and hand the feather to the Administering Body. Each feather was then deposited into a box, creating an archive of humane pauses and emergent imaginations towards the idea of leaving.

PPaP: Segment 2 was a four‑hour durational performance which unfolded across three interconnected spaces inside BROEI Gent: a Doing Space for communal construction, a Listening Space for a quiet encounter, and finally, a Flight Space, where the attempt to flight took place. As an open‑door, walk‑in environment, the audiences were invited to enter at their own pace, stay briefly or linger, and participate through simple, embodied actions.

In the Doing Space, visitors could join an ongoing collective process of sewing feather‑shaped pieces of fabric into a growing textile structure. On the elevated Listening Space, selected feathers from Segment 1 were exhibited as framed objects. Along the selected framed feather was an audio piece prepared by the artist: all voices came from the public audio recordings during Segment 1. Visitors received earphones and were encouraged to sit, lie down, or move gently through the space while listening, browsing, and connecting with the exhibited traces of public thoughtfulness. The last moments of the performance saw a coming-together of the bird structure and the textile wings. The bird was then collectively transported to the Flight Space, where the bird structure was positioned in its final gesture towards an attempt to flight.

Through sewing, listening, and shared presence, PPaP: Segment 2 created an ephemeral community where movement, personal narratives, linguistic affluence, collective making, and constant becomings coalesced.

Why have you chosen this topic?

I chose to pursue my research topic because the experiences and narratives surrounding migration, othering, and precarity remain crucially relevant. The criminalisation of movement from the “non‑west” and the persistent suspicion directed toward migrant bodies shape both public discourse, policies, and lived realities. As a migrant myself, these dynamics are not abstract concerns but part of a daily life – similar to the lives of many precarious individuals/communities I exist with in Europe.

In the contemporary climate of rising racist, fascist, and right‑wing sentiment, migrants and the Other are repeatedly positioned as scapegoats for broader social, cultural, and governmental failures. My artistic research responds to this by foregrounding and underlining lived experience, embodied knowledge, and the performative dimensions of integration rhetoric towards the Other. As both an artist and an anthropologist of migrant background, I consider it essentially necessary to keep on creating collaborative works which challenge dominant paradigms as well as contribute to the reimagining and attaining of more sustainable, diverse, and genuinely safe societies for all.

What research methods do you use?

I tread between combining reflexive ethnography and artistic immersion – two methods that allow me to work at the intersections of lived experience, artistic practice, and critical inquiry. Reflexive ethnography positions my own migrant point-of-departures and embodied experience as part of the research process – underlining how positionality grounds knowledge production. It requires a continual turning back to oneself while situating personal narratives within broader social, cultural, and institutional contexts.

Artistic immersion complements this by asserting art‑making as an epistemological apparatus. Through collaborative encounters with and by migrant&precarious bodies/communities, I develop artistic forms that emerge directly from shared experiences, exchanges, and embodied situations. These forms—whether performances, installations, or participatory actions—become sites where theoretical questions are tested, complicated, and made tangible.

Together, these methods allow me to move between the subtleties of thinking and doing, theory and practice, and the personal and communal. Reflexive ethnography and artistic immersion create a research environment where nuance, intersectionality, and lived experience can be explored with both rigor and ingenuity.

In what way did your research affect your artistic practice?

My research and artistic practice continuously inform one another; neither stands alone. Research sharpens my ability to articulate what my work is doing, why it matters, and how it resonates with broader contexts. One of my former professors, Dr. Ray Langenbach, once told me that if I cannot clearly speak about my (art)work, then I am not truly sharing it — and I carry that with me. The same is true for research: it only becomes meaningful when it is shared, discussed, challenged, and reimagined.

This reciprocal relationship has opened my understanding of artistic research as a process without a fixed endpoint. Both my artistic practice and my research pivot, shift, and remain in a state of becoming. They evolve through dialogue, experimentation, critique, and embodied experience. Research gives my artistic work conceptual depth and methodological grounding, while my artistic practice keeps the research rooted in lived realities, material experimentation, power relations, and existential complexities. Such approach allows a dynamic cycle of thinking and doing which periodically reshapes and furthers my work.

What are you hoping your research will result in, both personally and publicly?

Personally, I hope my research and my methods create spaces for migrant stories like mine to be heard, seen, and regarded with dignity. I want bodies and voice like mine—often positioned at the margins—to be positioned with equal dignity within the societies I inhabit. My research and artistic work(s) is a way of insisting on visibility, on presence, and on the legitimacy of lived experience as well as emotional truth as sites of knowledge.

Publicly, I hope to contribute to a more informed, humane, and grassroots‑centered shift in how migrant and the Other precarity is understood. My aim is to offer artistic and research‑based perspectives that challenge contemporary dominant paradigms and open up more compassionate attitudes toward those living at the edges of safety. I want the work to participate in building environments where marginalized existences are not only recognized but protected, and where diverse communities can imagine futures beyond tolerance, fear, and exclusion.