Jasmin Werner “Remote Control” at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin

Jasmin Werner’s artistic practice employs sculptural forms to explore the infrastructures and lived experiences of global migration. Her works address the aesthetic and political dimensions of labor migration by attending to its unseen economic and emotional transactions. In her latest body of works presented in her second solo exhibition “Remote Control” at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin, Werner’s installations offer a glimpse into the economies and communication technologies that migrants use to sustain transnationally dispersed lives.

At the center of “Remote Control” is an image of an admiral butterfly painted onto a prefabricated roller shutter. The work stems from the series Send Money Fast (2023), a set of painted shutters that Werner produced with the Berlin sign painter Dawid Celek. The collaboration emerged when Werner took notice of signs that Celek painted on the shutters of a store in the district of Moabit. The store sells second-hand mobile phones and offers Western Union services, which migrant communities use to transfer monetary remittances back to their home countries. Drawing on the painted shutter as an aesthetic advertisement of this migrant economic infrastructure, the artist commissioned Celek to adorn one of the shutters with a painting of the admiral butterfly—a migratory species whose cyclical North-South journeys symbolize migration under conditions of globalization.

The mobile phone store and its remittance services also inspired Werner’s newest works. Both mobile phones and remittances are fundamental to the Philippine diaspora, to which the artist belongs as second-generation descendant. In 1974, the Philippines’ kleptocratic dictator Ferdinand Marcos systematized the “Labor Export Policy,” which exported migrant workers abroad in response to neocolonial underdevelopment, unemployment, and state-incurred debt. Since then, the nation has become a “labor brokerage state”¹ sending scores of “Overseas Filipino Workers” (OFW) to live and work abroad in exchange for financial remittances transferred back to the Philippines, which constitutes about 10% of its GDP. Mobile phones and digital networks have become an essential feature of families divided between the Philippines and overseas.² Coupled with a diminished access to public spaces in the Philippines, the geographic dispersal of many Filipino families has contributed to the archipelagic nation becoming one of the heaviest worldwide users of the Internet and social media. 77% of Filipinos report engaging online more than in real life.³ Remote Control investigates the centrality of digital interactivity in transnational Filipino society. Werner commissioned a group of local artists in the town of Paete, where his family is from, to produce hand painted replicas of mobile phones made from papier-mâché. Paete is renowned for its centuries-old art of wood-carved sculptures, often used in Catholic rituals that date back to Spanish colonialism in the Philippines. The hand-painted phone replicas—replete with vividly colored portrayals of Facebook chat windows, emojis, screensavers, app displays, and images from popular culture—not only evince the tools of online interaction in Philippine social life, but also foreground the imaginations of local artists engaged in preserving this culturally significant vernacular art form. Adjacent to the fake phones, Werner has placed naturalistic wooden eyes carved in Paete, which reference saint sculptures and instill fascination and fear as icons of an all-seeing gaze.

The handmade phones in “Remote Control” point to the political consequences of pervasively digital life. Due to high social media usage and a lack of regulations, Philippine society has been subjected to algorithmic experiments with data mining, voter manipulation and propaganda dissemination.⁴ Werner’s sculptures Figure 2.1 Vic in his bedroom in Melbourne. and Figure 2.2 Pain using a desktop computer in the living room. (both 2024) refer to so-called “click farms” or “troll farms.” In these covered locations stacked with rows of phones linked to fake accounts, paid trolls sow misreporting and disinformation (or “fake news”) on social media while extracting data for repressive, anti-democratic ends. Trolling is a widespread illegal job in the Philippines and throughout the world; whereas the average monthly Philippine salary equates to 300 US-Dollar, ordinary citizens earn up to 1350 US-Dollar per month by working to propagate “networked disinformation.”⁵ Furthermore, trolling has been entwined with recent political controversies internationally. The latest 2022 presidential election of Bongbong Marcos, son of the former dictator, was rife with online falsehoods against the opposition candidate spread by organized networks of local trolls. Even more sinister is the Marcos family’s use of digital disinformation to spurn historical revisionism by proliferating online propaganda that rebrands the Marcos dictatorship—whose authoritarian rule was marked by systematic corruption, censorship, poverty, and extrajudicial killings—as the Philippines’ “golden age. ”⁶

Werner has additionally enlarged two photographs respectively featured in the two aforementioned sculptures, which are fragmented into phone-sized units. The photographs, of family members communicating online, are excerpted from Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto’s (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media (2022), an anthropological study of the construction of home through digital media among the Filipino diaspora in Australia. Werner’s juxtaposition of photographs of digital communication with the aesthetics of click farms underscores the susceptibility of overseas workers’ social networks to the infiltration of online propaganda that exploits the emotional language of nationalism. The artist’s sculpture editions DirectLine (2024) moreover conjure the social reproduction of digital technology’s promises and threats. While her installations made of mobile phones imitations stacked atop child-size tables gesture to the ethical dilemmas of online engagement that future generations of transnational families will inherit.

“Remote Control” reflects what Cabalquinto calls the “ambivalent intimacies” of digital technologies in contemporary migrant life.⁷ While mobile phones are essential for sending remittance payments and maintaining the rituals of family life, they also make local and diasporic families vulnerable to surveillance and digital disinformation. This ambivalence is palpable in Werner’s Aquarium and Gulf Madhyamam (both 2024), in which the phone replicas are placed adjacent to or against mirrored grids that evoke an apartment complex in which the artist lived in Makati, Manila—the financial center of the capital— as well as a cardboard fragment from a “Balikbayan box,” a parcel shipment typical for the country sent by overseas Filipinos back home. The artist’s conjoining of remittances, mobile phones, and disinformation contemplates the possibilities and perils that arise when digital technologies become the site in which home is produced and negotiated. Remote Control thus invites a reckoning with how the bonds of home and belonging can exist beyond fantasies of nationalism that open transnational families communicating online to control at a distance.
—Carlos Kong

at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin
until October 26, 2024