The Passage of the Storms Video

Gab Mejia is a queer Filipino photographer, multidisciplinary artist, and environmental engineer. Born and raised in the Philippines, he explores and weaves the different fabrics of visual storytelling, environmental design, and ecology through the arts, photography, poetics, and participatory research. His work unveils the threads of the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, queer expressions, ancestral knowledge, cosmologies, and cultural interconnections to confront our socio-political and ecological crises. Mejia is a National Geographic Explorer and a fellow in the International League of Conservation Photographers. He continues to explore the plurality of narratives, identities, and depictions of nature through myth-making and speculative documentary— hoping to gain a deeper understanding of our shared yet fraught relationship with the environment and of ourselves.

[www.gabmejia.com] Website

Project: The Passage of Storms traces the scars left behind by super typhoons— a visual elegy and documentary to the lives lost and the lives forgotten in a sea that remembers. After many months, even years, it is as if the storm had just crossed yesterday. Looking back within and after the beating of a storm’s eye, Super Typhoon Rai or locally known ‘Odette’ is the strongest typhoon that struck in the year 2021 only a few days before Christmas Eve. The Philippines is one of the countries most impacted by the climate crisis with an average of 20 typhoons crossing its islands annually. The onslaught of super-typhoons in the Philippines have not only wreaked momentary physical destruction, but cyclones of emotions within a sea of compounding trauma and fear within coastal communities. Who do they call on, when these storms have left their scars? Who are these “gods” in which they try to seek salvation? Wrapped within their thoughts and tides that surround their home of an archipelago, are they survivors or mere victims of an insidious cyclic system amid the tides in which they depend on? Coastal communities build and rebuild after every passing of a storm, only to be capitalized by a recurring system of disaster and loss, a creation of messianic myths upon their respective leaders and corporations as their sole constituents, indebted in these so-called gods with votes, debts, and loyalty who “rebuild” their homes. These acts of god, these storms amid this climate crisis, where can they be summoned, and who holds them accountable?