Cooking Adobo at the Hea(r)t of 25.2048° N, 55.2708° E is part of an ongoing series of self-portraits aimed to materialize how I was shaped by the span of time I have lived and worked in Dubai. This work aims to introspect questions like “where are you from,” violences that come with it and my relationship to the city of Dubai while having been away from the Philippines for two years.

While it is a project which questions relationships between a developing multi-cultural city and myself, it is all the more a journey inwards into where one belongs and what it means to isolate oneself in shared spaces — preserving the sense of home, cooking for one and surviving the everyday.