My Bio (120 words)
Vince Imbat uses images and text to explore what it means to be human in the intersection of material, mental, and virtual landscapes. When he was younger, he left a religious life only to find himself returning to the sublime through writing and photography. Today, Vince practices contemplative photography, digital gardening, and walking to create hybrid essays mapping the landscapes of Los Baños, Baguio, and Pangasinan in the Philippines. He publishes his works and works-in-progress on a digital archive he calls “talahardin” (garden of notes). His hybrid image and text-based essay “Traversing Liminality Through Walking: An Autoethnography” landed him a spot at the 20th Ateneo National Writers Workshop (ANWW). For Vince, photography is a liberating, inquiring, and creative spiritual practice.
Project Proposal (200 words)
According to Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter, politics is not purely a human pursuit. Nonhumans, including things like metal, rock, food, and even storms, have their own tendencies that could impede human will.
Using psychogeography, I would like to perform several libot, a kind of purposeless Filipino walk, around Siem Reap to explore how the nonhuman participates in the polis. Specifically, I want to photograph human-object relationships or traces of such.
The route of the walks won’t be planned. They would be rambles anchored only by a single compass in the form of a question: how has nonhuman matter asserted itself in a polis dominated by humans?
Although I shall begin with this question and let it guide me during the libot, the psychogeographic walking method necessitates that I embrace what emerges during the walk. I shall integrate whatever emerges into the photographs I take or let them change the subject of the walks altogether.
Since psychogeography entails not just an observation of the city but also an observation of one’s experience of the city, I shall include my own affectual response to the walks in deciding what and how to take photos as well as how to present them.
Topics (50 words)
- literature, history, philosophy, and phenomenology of walking
- anthropology and cultural geography of walkable landscapes
- psychogeography
- indigenous notions of walking
- liberating, inquiring, and creative spirituality
- digital note gardening
- drafts and archives as art
- images and text-based experiments
- experiences of perpetual liminality
- wilderness, thrownness, and existentialism
- regional and indigenous literature and art
What do you hope to learn at the workshops? (50 words)
I want to learn how to transform personal and abstract experiences and emotions, such as doubt, loneliness, or faith, into concrete images mirrored in physical form. I want to learn how to develop and present them to communicate stories that transform the personal into a socially and culturally relatable artifact.