Island—land because it is earth, but isle because surrounded by water. On land we plant roots, build homes, pave roads that take us from one land to another. But it is water that nourishes, refreshes, sits in the horizon and promises freedom. On the other hand, water is our source of life—sustenance, navigation, and imagination. But it is land that holds us steady, embraces us, keeps us together when we become almost untethered by possibility.

In other words, land is important because it is not water. And water is important because it is not land.

In many ways, this Yin/Yang relationship fits the Filipino experience. Ours is a country, after all, of contradictions. We are at once united by colonial conquest and divided by remnants of pre-colonial tribalism. Overseas work makes families whole and splits them apart. Faith is both our anchor and, at times, the very thing that drowns us in guilt or despair. We thrive in hardship but are burdened by resilience. We celebrate freedom but remain bound by cycles of history that we cannot seem to break.

In this collection of photographs, we celebrate and mourn; we connect and dismantle; we aggregate and disaggregate these contradictions that constitute archipelagic life. We see children diving into bodies of water triumphantly, but also a bleak leg-and-slipper in black and white. Chiseled mountains with armors of cloud or backdrops of galaxy, but also ones excavated and quarried. The richly-colored flora and fauna of this country, but also its burning fields. The livelihood and ritual of water, but also the deluged city—the urban lake. There is a person alone on a mountain and there is a sea of hands in worship. Some contradictions exist in separate works, and some live in the same one.

The Physicist Niels Bohr once said that the opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. But the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth. In this collection, we find proof of such a theorem: how it glorifies the many ways of being Filipino, while also questioning them. Every Filipino is tortured by water and nourished by it. Each one of us revels in our home soil, and is trapped in it. Every Filipino imagines life beyond the horizon, but everyone beyond our shores wishes only for return. No man is an island, but also: Everyone is.

Nicole Soriano-Lao and Gian Lao