Tina Villadolid

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Animist Meets Catholic: Melding of Spirituality in Colonial Philippines

In the late 16th century, a key element of the Spanish conquest of the Philippines was the establishment of Catholic friars in the archipelago. Forbidden to practice their indigenous animist spirituality, people of the Philippines found ways to fuse animism with Catholicism as a creative form of resistance to colonial oppression. Studying the Spanish devotional literature from the 16th and 17th centuries at the Folger Shakespeare Library will deepen my understanding of the tricksterism of Filipino spirituality from that period. These studies will allow me to more fully comprehend how to subvert and reclaim the generational inheritances of these histories through the materiality of my practice.