Orange Project, Bacolod, Philippines
On view until 7 January 2026

In Paranoia and Wilderness, Orange Project gathers a powerful constellation of artists whose practices move between the primal and the contemporary, tracing how fear, intuition, memory, and identity are shaped by both environment and experience. Rooted in the Philippine context—where dense landscapes, layered histories, and communal mythologies inform daily life—the exhibition reframes paranoia not as pathology, but as a learned sensitivity: a way of navigating the unknown, whether that unknown is the jungle, the body, institutions, or the mind itself.

The exhibition text draws from Hiligaynon terms—kulba, kakugmat, kibang, mariit—to articulate states of unease that arise when one confronts unfamiliar terrain. Historically, this terrain was the wilderness: lush, sentient, and unpredictable. Today, as the exhibition suggests, paranoia has migrated inward and outward at once, manifesting through systemic violence, inherited trauma, illness, gendered fear, and fractured social realities. Across mediums and generations, each artist becomes an explorer, turning dread into something intimate, legible, and strangely familiar.

BRANDON BRAZA

A 24-year-old queer artist from Negros Island, Brandon Braza’s practice is anchored in autobiography and lived experience. Working across traditional craft, digital remnants, and assemblage, Braza gives material form to what is often unseen: queer life in rural Philippines, memory carried through domestic textures, and identity shaped at the intersection of culture and gender. For Braza, the personal is inseparable from the political—his works quietly resist erasure by insisting that intimate narratives belong within broader social histories. In Paranoia and Wilderness, his contributions feel like acts of witnessing, mapping the emotional terrain of belonging and otherness, and asking what it means to call a place “home” when visibility itself can feel precarious.

BUROG ALVARADO

A leading Negrense artist from Sagay, Burog Alvarado brings to the exhibition a practice deeply entwined with place, memory, and cultural inheritance. His works in Paranoia and Wilderness are informed by childhood experiences in Fabrica, Sagay City—growing up near a river prone to flooding, and amid local beliefs such as tuyaw, a diabolic spell that instilled communal unease. These early encounters with vulnerability and superstition shaped what Alvarado describes as “the interplay between the unknown and the familiar, urging us to seek joy with fairness, to tread lightly yet bravely, and to let caution and wonder share the same breath.”

Coming from a family of artists, Alvarado understands creativity as a “shared language… one that connects generations and nurtures individuality.” His works draw on resourcefulness and material availability, guided by a belief that “every object, no matter how ordinary, holds the potential to become art.” Home, for Alvarado, is not merely geographic but ethical: Fabrica remains the wellspring of his artistic vocabulary, where sound, texture, and communal stories continue to inform his socially conscious approach.

E.S.L. CHEN

Based in Metro Manila, E.S.L. Chen’s practice occupies the liminal space between analog and digital, knowing and not knowing. His work Tranquilo explores paranoia as a cyclical condition—simultaneously meditative and violent. Beginning with repeated oval forms inspired by the ouroboros, Chen approached painting as both ritual and escape, only to realize, midway, that “there may be no end,” prompting a sudden rupture into imagery of violence. “Sometimes,” he reflects, “being at peace has a similarity to being distraught with fear. Both states occupy two sides of the same coin.”

Chen’s sense of identity is shaped by movement—frequent relocations, shifting socio-economic realities, and an upbringing marked by both tradition and resistance to it. Ethnically Chinese yet culturally hybrid, he describes himself as an outcast who learned to seek new approaches, finding value in tradition while refusing to be bound by it. His works function as preserved visual memories, translating personal history into paradoxical images where calm and chaos coexist.

GUENIVERE DECENA

Multidisciplinary artist Guenivere Decena approaches art-making as respiration—an act of survival, reflection, and becoming. Her contributions to Paranoia and Wilderness include the monumental painting The Sacred Weaver and the intimate paper works The Weight of a Brush 1 & 2, accompanied by a site-specific thread installation. Drawing from evolutionary biology and cosmology, The Sacred Weaver imagines the artist as part of an infinitesimal lineage of mothers, stretching back to the origins of life itself. “Looking back,” Decena reflects, “is only a burden if we look back through the lens of our personal story. But looking further back… life never fails to be beautiful. Wonderful. Sacred.”

Diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, Decena’s work confronts paranoia through the body—its fragility, pain, and persistence. Her self-portraits focus on hands she watched “blacken, quiver and struggle,” reminding her simultaneously of illness and aliveness. A third-world single mother and cultural worker, Decena frames gratitude and love as radical acts, calling her practice a “personal revolution” against a world marked by environmental collapse and social trauma. Home, for her, is found in community: “We are each other’s miracle, everyday.”

JAYVEE NECESARIO

Jayvee Necesario’s haunting figurative drawings probe the limits of flesh and spirit. Working primarily in graphite, pen, and ink, he constructs sinewy, skeletal bodies caught in states of decay and transformation. These anatomies—at once divine and deteriorating—become meditations on impermanence, suffering, and existential dread. In the context of Paranoia and Wilderness, Necesario’s work turns the body into a site of unease, where identity dissolves and reforms under pressure. His deconstruction of idealized forms confronts viewers with the cost of existence itself, situating paranoia within the inevitability of bodily decline.

KARINA BROCE-GONZAGA

Karina Broce-Gonzaga’s practice unfolds through intuition, process, and sustained attention to becoming. Her works in the exhibition dwell in the “in-between”—a space where uncertainty is not resolved but inhabited. Using cut fabric collage and weaving, she holds opposing energies together: disruption and patience, fragmentation and care. For Broce-Gonzaga, wilderness is not a place of being lost, but “a state of navigation,” where the journey matters as much as the destination.

Raised in environments that valued creativity, movement, and discipline, and shaped by early motherhood, her work reflects womanhood as fluid and evolving. Living between San Carlos and Bacolod, she describes home as both grounding and challenging—spaces that allow sincerity and experimentation to coexist. When a storm damaged one of her works during installation, she chose to rework it rather than discard it, allowing fragility and external forces to alter the process. The gesture echoes the exhibition’s broader ethos: paranoia as attentiveness, and making as a form of trust.

MIKIBOY PAMA

For Mikiboy Pama, Paranoia and Wilderness functions as a visual diary born from anxiety triggered by global conflict—war, religion, genocide, corruption. His three works reflect a search for peace through reconnection with nature, prompted by daily biking and trail exploration. “This body of work is not an escape from reality,” he explains, “but a reflection on why humanity chooses conflict over reconnection with nature.”

Rooted in Negros’ complex socio-political history, and shaped by living between Christianity and Islam within one household, Pama rejects fixed identity in favor of process and metaphor. His mixed-media works—combining found objects, collage, and drawing—invite viewers into dialogue, allowing meaning to emerge through exchange. Home, for Pama, is Bacolod itself: a place where art remains grounded in lived experience rather than trend, and where senior artists have modeled courage in presenting one’s roots without fear.

ZABIEL NEMENZO

Emerging artist Zabiel Nemenzo brings a fiercely feminist lens to the exhibition, framing her works under the concept of Hysteria—a 19th-century diagnosis historically used to control women. Drawing from Greek notions of the “wandering uterus,” her practice examines women’s psychological trauma as something deeply familiar to women yet often invisible to men. Triggered by a friend’s experience of sexual harassment and victim-blaming, Nemenzo positions art as social responsibility: “to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.”

Her use of embroidery is both symbolic and autobiographical. Threads recall medical sutures from her childhood heart surgery, becoming emblems of survival and continuity. Working from a small room, navigating economic precarity, Nemenzo’s material choices reflect both practicality and meaning. Her works insist that personal struggle is inseparable from systemic critique, and that home—however modest—can be a site of resistance and voice.

Together, the artists of Paranoia and Wilderness chart a collective map of fear transformed by intuition, care, and community. Moving from jungle to institution, from body to memory, the exhibition suggests that paranoia is not simply something to be shed, but something to be understood—an inherited alertness shaped by environment, history, and identity. In doing so, Paranoia and Wilderness resonates deeply with CNTRFLD.ART’s ongoing inquiry into diasporic experience and the notion of home: not as a fixed place, but as a shifting, lived condition—one we learn to navigate, even in the dark.

With thanks to Candy Nagrampa and the Orange Project team for facilitating this story.

Images courtesy of Orange Project

JAYVEE NECESARIO