IJWBAA [eej-wah] is a Filipino digital artist and the first Filipino recognized in the Techspressionism movement. He is a neologist and the originator of Decolonial Minimalism—an art movement that reclaims minimalism through ancestral memory and cultural reawakening. His works, compiled in two volumes of I Just Wannabe an Artist, have been recognized, officially archived, cataloged, and made available in the collections of the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Museo Reina Sofía, the National Museum of the Philippines, Getty Research Institute, and other prominent cultural institutions worldwide.

Mga Wika sa Gilid ng Katahimikan (Languages at the Edge of Silence) #2

Mga Wika sa Gilid ng Katahimikan (Languages at the Edge of Silence) #2

Decolonial Minimalism Founding Work - Culture (Wika)

Size: 1400 x 1400 pixels

Medium: Digital Art

Artist: IJWBAA

Year: 2025

Description:

Mga Wika sa Gilid ng Katahimikan (Languages at the Edge of Silence) is a typographic artwork by IJWBAA that embodies decolonial minimalism as a quiet but forceful act of resistance. It presents a stark list of endangered languages from Visayas and Mindanao—Inata, Karolanos, Masbatenyo, Kiniray-a, Ata Manobo, Tigwahanon Manobo, Matigsalug Dibabawon, Mandaya, Mansaka, and others—without ornamentation, translation, or explanation. This refusal to aestheticize or contextualize is deliberate. Each name is treated as a sovereign utterance, a vessel of ancestral knowledge and relational memory. The viewer is not comforted but confronted, asked to sit with the weight of unfamiliarity, disappearance, and historical neglect.

Here, minimalism becomes a strategy of radical care. The absence of narrative resists the colonial impulse to domesticate Indigenous identity, allowing the typography to function as a mnemonic archive—a roll call of languages on the verge of extinction, many with only a handful of living speakers. “Luzon” is reclaimed not as a colonial map but as ancestral terrain, re-inscribed through linguistic presence. Each name becomes both scar and seed: a trace of historical erasure and a gesture toward resurgence. The horizontal placement of the words evokes a vigil or roll call, resisting hierarchy and offering a flat ontology where each language is equally vital, equally endangered, equally named.

The red background ignites this ritual of remembrance, evoking fire, blood, and the urgency of ancestral survival. It transforms the artwork into a chromatic flare—less a backdrop than a pulse, burning with archival intent. Against this field of silence, the names appear as anchored utterances, floating yet firm. The linear arrangement becomes a typographic horizon, a lifeline rather than a timeline, where memory and disappearance meet. Together, the blue expanse and the minimalist typography enact a somatic stillness, inviting the viewer to listen not just with their eyes but with their body. In your radical care archive, this piece could be framed as a typographic libation—a visual offering poured out for languages on the edge of silence, a horizontal invocation of what colonial history tried to erase.

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Publication:

IJWBAA. Decolonial Minimalism. Photobook, mm/dd/yyyy, p. #. - coming soon

Exhibitions:

IJWBAA. Filipino Folklore and Identity: What Makes a Filipino? The Wrong Biennale – 7th Edition, Open Pavilion, 1 Nov. 2025 – 31 Mar. 2026, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/ijwbaa-eej-wah.