Glove Origins ⠀
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Connecting local food justice to my motherland of the Philippines, these gloves are sourced from and blessed by the soil of my neighborhood community farm, Red Hook Farms in Brooklyn. Red Hook contains the largest public housing complex in NYC with majority Black and brown community who face ongoing power outages, water stoppages, and food insecurity throughout Covid, and lost 400+ trees to construction and lead contamination from years of unregulated industry & city neglect in the area. Despite these adversities, BIPOC-led Red Hook Farms thrives with its program of hired Youth Farmers, generous farm team, and volunteers from all over NYC. This 2.75 acre plot serves a CSA (of which I've been a member for the last 3 years), free fresh food boxes to folx in need, a NYCHA resident bartering system (work on the farm, take home fresh produce), and the opportunity to build healthy relations with the land in an urban setting. ⠀
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Dye & embroidery are new practices for me as a mostly performance-based (music, dance, theatre) artist! I see the act of donning these gloves & growing food for your community as the most important form of human sensorial “performance” and art.

One-of-a-kind hand dyed & embroidered work gloves for Liyang Network‘s Defend the Defenders art raffle campaign & Free Them All virtual gathering, an evening in Solidarity with Political Prisoners fighting for land & food sovereignty from Indigenous rights, the Peasant Farmers Movement, & climate justice. All proceeds help women political prisoners in Mindinao meet their basic needs via Karapatan. These gloves were sourced & blessed by the soil & harvest spirit of my local Red Hook Farms, inspired by agro-ecologist, Peasant Farmers Movement activist, Bungkalan foremother, & former political prisoner, Angie Ipong. Detailed embroidered palay (rice, pre-harvest) decorate the cuffs as a symbol of food sovereignty in solidarity with farmers whose livelihoods have been devastated by the Rice Liberalization Law. These gloves are a utilitarian call-to-action to build tangible, radical relations with the land by means of community farming anywhere. ⠀
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The Left Hand is dyed with colors inspired by Sabokahan & the Lumad tribe (red, yellow, black), with the word BUNGKALAN embroidered in blue at the knuckle, linking the Peasant Movement to Indigenous Movement. Bungkalan encompasses the concept of sustainable organic community farming tied to food justice in serving food insecure & marginalized people by reclaiming land from harmful agribusiness & the industry of globalization. The seed of Bungkalan began during Ipong’s wrongful imprisonment, where she organized a community garden to feed & reactivate those incarcerated. Ipong also wrote “Bungkalan Manwal Sa Organikong Pagsasaka” — a community farming manual thru the lens of social justice and land reform. There are powerful ties between this book & “Farming While Black” by Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm.⠀
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The Right Hand is rainbow-dyed and reads FREE THEM ALL in red in intersectional solidarity & colorful unity with ALL political prisoners worldwide.

RAFFLE CLOSED! THANK YOU TO ALL WHO DONATED!

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