INFERNAL REBIRTH INTO HELL: ILLUSIONS AND REALITIES

Infernal Rebirth into Hell: Illusions and Realities, Intel Lastierre’s latest solo exhibition, reveals the imperial paradox of the immigrant experience. Drawing on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave alongside mythological and historical references, Lastierre compels viewers to distinguish truth from the colonial propaganda of the American Dream.

In Lastierre’s interpretation of Plato’s allegory, the shadows in the cave represent the United States’ illusory promises: liberty, equality, and the opportunity to create a full life, regardless of who you are. But historically, these romantic ideas of a nation founded on freedom are a predatory comfort—mirages that simultaneously conceal and justify the violence of exploitative immigration policies in the United States. By comparing those who accept the shadows as reality to prisoners, Lastierre demonstrates the self-fulfilling trap encasing her people.

Konting tiis na lang. Just a little more suffering. Filipinos take cultural pride in resilience, but in oppressive hands, this pride is manipulated into a tool of compliance; the chains that keep the prisoners docile in the cave. For generations, the United States has stolen Filipino labor, resources, and lives, creating a cycle of economic displacement and perpetuating a reliance on opportunities abroad, where migrants are indiscriminately surveilled, detained, and deported. While the United States exerts influence over the Philippines’ government through their insidious brand of democratic corruption, the current Filipino puppet president unquestioningly offers his own people to the altar of his ousted father’s greedy dictatorial legacy. With over a tenth of Filipinos working overseas because life at home is insupportable, Lastierre asks: at what point will migrants stop chasing phantasmal shadows and resist the intentional design of their oppression?

Through large-scale paintings, sculptures, and immersive installations, Lastierre rejects the capacity to suffer as a solution for systemic exploitation. Balikbayan: Boxes of Longing is a poignant portrayal of diasporic grief, stacking 16 balikbayan boxes—care packages symbolizing self-sacrificing love despite separation—into a canvas inspired by Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. Popularized in the 1980s by overseas Filipino workers, balikbayan boxes are named for their function: to return to the country. As Lastierre’s largest installation to date, Balikbayan demonstrates not only the physical journey of migration but also the ubiquity of Filipino displacement. The painting itself abstracts the human form while maintaining realistic textures of the flesh, creating figures that are tangible yet anonymously universal. Similarly to its inspiration, Balikbayan portrays death in the lower left corner and recalls the cannibalism on the original raft. Lastierre’s interpretation, however, is less literal and more esoteric, comparing cannibalism to the destruction of native culture and identity that America demands from migrants as the only way to assimilate and survive.

Created as a personal chronicle of Lastierre’s own disillusionment, Infernal Rebirth into Hell challenges us to escape the cave by questioning: who is a necessary sacrifice and who is worthy of a dignified life? Who gets to decide?

— Regine Malibiran Curatorial Fellow Statement