Tropicalcore

Search the tag and you will find a beach with nobody on it.

Anime girls in swimwear. Cartoon mascots holding coconuts. Filters cranked until the water goes neon. A tropics assembled in an app by people who have never woken up sweating at 4AM, never queued for a tricycle in the rain, never lived a single day inside the heat they are decorating with.

That is not tropicalcore. That is a screensaver.

I am taking the word back.

tropicalcore is island life as the subject, not the backdrop.

Not the postcard. The people, the places, the things. The fan turning over a melting halo-halo. The nap in the tricycle. Karaoke at 2AM with the neighbours awake and not complaining. The dog on the road who belongs to everybody and nobody.

The tropics are not a mood. Billions of people live in them and have opinions.

tropicalcore is slowness on purpose.

I found it in 2020, sitting with coffee and a cigarette on an afternoon with nothing in it. The whole world had been forced to stop, and I noticed the stopping was not the emergency. The rushing was.

Doing nothing is not laziness. It is refusing to hand your hours to someone who did not earn them. Every plan you cancel is a room you take back.

Stillness and motion are not opposites here. Look around wherever you are sitting. Both are already happening.

tropicalcore comes from the Global South and does not apologise for it.

The artist in the Philippines works without a cinematheque, without an industry, without an archive, without a safety net, and makes the work anyway. That is not a deficiency to be fixed before the art counts. That is the condition the art comes out of, and it is more interesting than anything a residency will teach you.

We are not waiting to be discovered. Discovery is something that happens to territory.

The how is not precious.

Phone. Pen. Borrowed camera. Friends who show up. Make the film, the podcast, the meme, the play. Shoot it on what you have, in the language you actually speak, with the people who are already in the room.

Honest beats deep. Finished beats perfect.

Why.

Because the work is a bridge between the body and the spirit, and you are on both sides of it.

Because you are not auditioning for permission. The sun is your spotlight. The wind is your praise.

Because the point is not to defeat the thing in your way. It is to be the hero who holds the villain with compassion, and keeps making anyway.

Unrig the system. Stop waiting for your turn to shine.

Written in Lahug, where Legend Andy Denson Heals Under God's grace.

Ladder Production Films. Cebu City, Philippines. Operating since 2011.

#tropicalcore