Speaker: Stephanie Syjuco
Contemporary Artist

The following audio recording provides information on the mistreatment of Filipinos at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

My name is Stephanie Syjuco, and I’m a visual artist speaking to you from Oakland, California. And the work that I have in the exhibition is called Block Out the Sun from 2019.

I was invited by the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis to do a solo exhibition in 2019. In the lead-up to it, they invited me to come out and do some research, specifically on the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. It turns out that in 1904 over 1,200 Filipinos were imported into St. Louis to be put on display as part of the fair. And as a Filipino American artist, I was very interested in this as a historical legacy of both St. Louis and also how photography came into play.

My project Block Out the Sun consists of 30 images, all taken in different archives within St. Louis. And going through files and files of these images, I was really challenged with how to respond as a contemporary artist. These photographs are over 100 years old. They also tell a very different story about how we now view other cultures. And I wanted to create a kind of thoughtful but also a very sort of personal and even emotional response to it. I use my hands to literally block out the ability to view the images. And this was actually strategic. It was a way for me to kind of talk back to the archive.

In my recent works in photography, I’ve been really focused on both the history of photography as well as how it developed in conjunction with anthropology. And so, it turns out that a lot of these early kind of anthropological or ethnographic photographs were also taken during the time of American colonial expansion. And so, thinking about myself as both an American as well as a Filipino, you know, those places intersect through photography in the early ethnographic photos that American anthropologists were taking. And so, interestingly, what appear to be these kind of photographs taken in a foreign land were actually taken in St. Louis. And so, what you’re looking at behind my hands covering the individuals are actually re-created, fake Filipino villages set up in St. Louis. And so, I think that’s an interesting kind of commentary, too, on how the discipline of anthropology actually also constructs what it wants to see, instead of just documenting what’s actually there.