The End

The End (2019, video, single-channel)

The End is a satirical video work made in 2019, at the height of the Filipino fake news frenzy around Marcos Gold. It is packaged in the style of fake news content distributed around the internet, made by paid troll farms working on behalf of the Marcos family. 2019 was also the year my mother started using Facebook religiously, a shift I felt in the world: the year before COVID, when everyone seemed to move online at once. As a result of this frenzy, Marcos' son, Bongbong Marcos, won the Philippine presidency in 2022.

This video work was originally shown as part of an installation of grass textures stolen from the virtual game Second Life, where I spent hours and days in my childhood. The grass textures were shown in petri dishes, with one of them exploding and spreading around the installation. This is where the video emerges from, something happening in an intangible world, spreading into the real one.

For me, The End records a moment in 2019: a world transitioning into the acceleration of the post-truth era.