KIRI DALENA LOOKS AT ME and acknowledges familiarity ?here is no high and mighty, isolated and removed artist. After establishing the lines that bound us, she jokingly whispers a rhetorical question, ?I am not young or exciting? why am I here??

For Kiri, her art is everything and a representation of her own personal involvement in the lives that are lived in this country and the contingent deaths we face every day. It is about her activism?the kind that translates into a dynamism in her work that refuses to be ahistorical, and banks precisely on a conscientious and consistent interest in the nation she lives in.

In this sense, Kiri seems to be necessarily in collaboration with her world all of the time, across the kinds of media she delves in?sculpture, documentary filmmaking, installation art?all these years we have known her to be an artist.

Kiri speaks of the dynamism of her recent work currently at the National Museum. She had asked carvers from her native Paete, Laguna, to render her clay sculptures in wood, replete with all its flaws and mistakes.

Here, Kiri speaks of how the weight of her work lies as well in its imperfections and seeming disregard for what would otherwise be deemed orderly, or correct, or, well, just plain perfect.

She also speaks of this collaboration as something that?s new to her, and, therefore as something that?s appealing.

Which just might be what keeps Kiri all excited?and exciting?as an artist. When the deep well of creativity comes from one?s own sense of the real conditions of nation, when it is entrenched in the societal changes and unjust stabilities that oppress and repress us, when it is conscious of one?s role in the bigger stage that we all necessarily perform in, there can really only be excitement.