Pawel Althamer
January 2017

In early January 2017, Pawel Althamer and his partner, Julia Petelska, traveled to the Philippines to participate in a residency centered on the annual procession of the Black Nazarene in the Quiapo district of Manila. This procession is one of the largest peaceful gatherings of humanity anywhere in the world, and lasted 22 hours with 1.4 million devotees on January 9th, 2017. In previous bodies of work in Venice, New York, Warsaw, and Berlin, Pawel was able to connect diverse communities of people through his art-making process, often incorporating live casting to draw in disenfranchised members of the neighbourhood and transform how the public perceives them.Quiapo during Traslacion was a fitting place for Pawel and his team of 17 local artists and art students to cast the diversity of this dynamic neighborhood: from a Muslim child living with her father in a rickshaw, to a community of nuns, to transvestite fire dancers, and from seven-year-old to seventy-year-old devotees of the Nazareno. The team cast about 52 faces, hands, and feet that were actively part of the miracle seeking found on the streets of Quiapo on January 9th, and these relics were then transferred to the workshops of Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar in Bataan.