About the Artist
Alice Sarmiento is a full-time educator, freelance writer, independent curator, and occasional seamstress. Her writing and curatorial work centers feminist, relational, and community-engaged practices, while her work as a critic casts a feminist lens across Filipino cultural production, ranging from contemporary art to Pinoy showbiz.
As a curator, Alice has worked on the curatorial teams of the inaugural (and so far, only) Manila Biennial in 2018 as well as the Visayas Visual Art Exhibition and Conference (VIVA ExCon) in 2023. Before returning to Rimbun Dahan for the second month of her residency, she founded Spare Bedroom, a space for restaging installative and relational works, in order to extend their public programs and reactivate engagement with their community.
Alice is also a member of the Rural Women Advocates, leading creative and curatorial projects to advocate for women in the peasant sector. She has also volunteered since 2011 as an adoption counselor and humane educator for the Philippine Animal Welfare Society.
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About the Residency
I came to Rimbun Dahan to look at the center’s textile collection, and use it as a prompt to think about heritage textiles and indigenous craft methods. As someone who had worked with textiles in different capacities in the past (first as an undergraduate in a fashion program, then as a teacher, then as a researcher for several curatorial projects) I was familiar with the anxieties around this form of cultural production, one which so heavily depends on women’s work.
Using the time and space afforded to me by this residency, as well as its proximity to a wealth of other Malaysian resources in the form of markets, museums and friendly banter, I began working on Once A Vibrant Tradition – a text that negotiates the tensions of craft and community caught in the crosshairs of capitalism.
For Open Day, Alice will be in conversation with Wen Di Sia artist, writer, and advocate from Gerimis Art, a group that documents and supports the arts, culture, and local economy of the Orang Asli. She will also be sharing printed drafts of the Malaysia sections of Once A Vibrant Tradition in zine form, in order to open these to the public for comment.
[Photo of Alice Sarmiento by Nuril Basri]