Community of Practice
Russ Ligtas, artist
Russ Ligtas is a visual artist, performance maker, actor, and choreographer living in Manila, the Philippines. His poly-disciplinary work most often emanates from a roster of alter egos that manifest as presence, persona, or myth — archetypes of various states and inherited complexes that populate his quest to locate notions of identity as a post-colonial child. In 2017, he received the Alvin Erasga Tolentino Choreography Award, a KoryoLab grant from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and an Asian Cultural Council fellowship. His work has been presented across the Philippines, the US, Europe, and Asia in platforms such as P-Noise Festival (Denmark), Low Fat Art Fest (Thailand), the Visayas Biennale (Philippines), and the Yokohama Triennale (Japan) to name a few. He is currently collaborating with Eisa Jocson (“Princess”, “Manila Zoo”), Baboo Liao (“Mythology Upon the Table”, “Artificial Hells”) and Szu Ni Wen (“How to Heal”). Recently, his art practice has expanded towards filmmaking with his debut short film “PLUTO” commissioned by the Casa San Miguel Center for the Arts in San Antonio.
Description of current research
From my previous fascination with the color blue, I’m currently diving deeper the color towards the element it is most ascribed to: Water. A substance that constitutes 60% of the human being, 71% of the planet, and is a metaphor for the more abstract dimensions and concepts; the subconscious, memory, emotions, the afterlife. Now with all the current global crises, water threatens to either swallow cities alive or deprive humanity of its life-giving properties whilst we continue to search for traces of it in distant planets for hopes of a planet b.