Paolo Faelnar is a writer and transdisciplinary artist. His theoretical practice privileges the communitarian ethic of “pakikipagkapwa,” centering “We” as an exploratory logic; a decolonial methodology of knowing and making; and a gesture that acknowledges the inherent insufficiencies of the “I” and “self.”

His scholarship borrows wisdom from “katutubong pamamaraan ng pananaliksik,” or indigenous research methodologies, and is intimately entangled with Black feminist thought, queer of color critique, performance art and Black critical theory.

His ongoing creative and community project examines the labor of Care performed by Filipina migrants in the UAE: its essentializing tendency to identity and nation, its entanglement in extractive colonial histories, and its place within global circuits of capitalism.