In “Filipinos, Cannibalism, and Mothers Dancing on Tongues,” Stephanie Misa explores first languages and the complication this notion implies in contexts where the mother tongue is a purely spoken language outside of institutional (read-write) frameworks. In this piece, Misa questions power hierarchies implicit in institutionalized languages by putting forward marginalized oralities and their alternative forms of expression. She argues that the embodiment of an orality, its containment in a colonized, disenfranchised, diasporic body, is exactly what gives it power and agency. Orality is a way to access an intersectionality, one that ruptures the idea of bound cultures, and instead proposes that culture—by extension, language—is in a perpetual flux marked by creative becomings, which in order to manifest requires us to break down and re-digest what constitutes a “mother tongue”— to imbibe, expel, replenish, take shape—and sing, sing in a tongue blessed by many mothers.‍


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Stephanie Misa (PHL/ USA) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2012. She has a masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and is currently a doctoral researcher at the University of Arts in Helsinki, Academy of Fine Arts. Misa examines complex and diverse histories through her videos, writing, sculptural installations, and prints. She recently won the Art Foundation Merita Award for Artistic Research 2021, and will (hopefully) be in residency at the RMIT Intersect in Melbourne in 2022. She lives and works in Vienna, Austria.‍
‍www.stephaniemisa.com‍

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