Decolonial Minimalism

What is Decolonial Minimalism?

Decolonial Minimalism is a contemporary artistic and philosophical movement I founded to reclaim minimalism from its Western colonial heritage and reorient it toward Filipino and postcolonial realities.

It is a response to aesthetic erasure—an act of reconfiguring space, silence, and simplicity not as Western ideals, but as cultural memory, resistance, and ancestral presence.

This movement centers:

Indigenous Filipino memory and form

Silence and space as protest

Ritualized digital practice

Anti-colonial reinterpretations of modernism

It is not an art style—it is an act of liberation through restraint.

Manifesto

What happens when the colonized reclaim space?

1. We reject the purity of form when it denies our history.

2. We make sacred the silence left behind by erasure.

3. We embrace restraint—not as submission, but as resistance.

4. We claim minimalism not as subtraction, but as compression of memory.

5. We honor indigenous geometries, repetitions, and ritualized marks.

6. We use digital tools not to replicate colonial aesthetics, but to reframe our ancestral visions.

7. We mourn, we resist, we remember—with economy, with purpose, with fire.

We are the descendants of those who were once silenced.

Now we shape our own emptiness.

We fill it with memory, meaning, and the echoes of liberation.

We are not minimalists.

We are decolonial minimalists.

— IJWBAA

Join the Dialogue

If you’re an artist, scholar, or cultural worker exploring similar paths, I welcome collaboration, dialogue, and reinterpretation. Decolonial Minimalism begins with me—but it is meant to grow with others who carry the same fire. Use #decolonialminimalism on social media to share your work and be part of the conversation. Join our growing community on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.

Explore the full papers:

Decolonial Minimalism in Art: Reclaiming Space, Silence, and Memory