Assemblages in the form of dioramas or terrariums are found in this series. These objects reconfigure microscopic life-worlds, which create theatrical depictions of cruelty (ranging from highly local to supranational) bound together by exploitative practices of hegemonic neo-imperial powers. Dayrit assembles a gallery of horrors marked with intersections that encapsulate different forms of slavery: mineral extraction, mono- crop agriculture, cheap labor, militarization, and the market of surplus that geographer Jason Moore describes as the “internal and external frontiers that snake their ways into our web of life.”

Postcolonial scholars regard the Philippine archipelago as tropical science laboratories and tourist destinations. The islands are treated as sources of inexhaustible raw materials and extractable minerals for modern modes of capitalist power. Terra Rationarium is a term used for land inventory and provides context for the treatment of land as repositories of wealth.
The images of houses spell out histories of aggression and corruption, its direct effects on the colonized body through objects that depict surplus labor, and other detrimental realities associated with colonial production. As such, amid the presumed independence and sovereignty, evidence of imperialism resides within the objects contained in these assemblages, which refer to the local corporations and agents of neoliberalism that uphold modern-day slavery and imperialism.

-Gwen Bautista