CONTACT
Jon Cuyson
침묵의 바다 Sea of Silence | 2021 | 13’29”
Courtesy the Artist
Courtesy the Artist
Synopsis
Sea of Silence (2021) is an experimental film moving between documentary and speculative fiction, exploring the fragile thresholds between presence and absence, life and death through the reconfiguration of memory. Composed from archival photographs, found footage, and constructed imagery, the film approaches the archive not as a stable record but as a shifting field where fragments surface, drift, and disappear across time. Through these traces, it evokes submerged histories of Filipino seafaring and agricultural labor, family memory, and the lingering afterlives of colonialism. Revisiting archival residues of empire, Sea of Silence reflects on structures of containment and freedom across rural, urban, and oceanic landscapes. Within these spaces appear gestures of invisible labor, bodies moving through ships, ports, and waters yet often absent from official histories. The sea emerges as a living archive where migration, labor, and memory accumulate, allowing past and present to fold into one another within Scene V : Back to the Sea.
About the artist
Jon Cuyson is a Filipino interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, educator, and curator whose work explores maritime histories, queer ecologies, and the entanglements of labor, migration, and memory. Working across painting, installation, sculpture, artist books, and moving images, his projects approach the sea not as landscape but as a living archive where personal and collective histories converge. His practice examines the ocean as a site of circulation and accumulation where colonial trade routes, maritime labor, ecological transformation, and diasporic longing intersect. Central to his work is Kerel, a fictional queer Filipino seafarer who navigates layered narratives of migration, desire, and oceanic belonging across film and installation. Through what he calls Mussel Thinking, a conceptual framework inspired by ecological processes of filtering, clustering, and sedimentation, Cuyson proposes alternative ways of understanding relation, survival, and oceanic time. He received his MFA in Painting from Columbia University and will represent the Philippines at the 61st Venice Biennale (2026) with the installation Sea of Love.