Muscle Memory: Adapting the Ethnographic in Carlos Villa’s 1971 Tatu Series

Drawing over photos of himself with an ink pen and at times affixing feathers to the surface of these images, Filipino-American Carlos Villa completed his Tatu series in 1971 in the Bay Area in the midst of multicultural movements advocating for social equity through multicultural solidarity. Through analysis of the Tatu series, this paper considers Villa’s engagement with ethnographic collections of ritual objects as source materials to intervene in his own self-representation. Mining ethnographic sources to manifest himself within a primordial lineage imagined through the visuality of Oceanic tattoos, textiles, and garments, Villa creates palimpsestic self-portraits with layered temporalities. The materiality of works in the Tatu series demonstrate the processes of their own creation, registered in the disjointed textures ink and feathers laid over photos of Villa donning denim jeans with a leather studded belt.

Throughout his career, Villa’s endeavor to imagine “roots” for himself as a diasporic Filipino was mediated through Third Worldist politics: both through his vision of a primordial pan-Oceanic heritage as well as through identification between Asian Americans and other marginalized diasporic communities. This paper considers how Villa appropriated the materials and aesthetics of ritual to advance a form of self-identification inextricably embedded in the politics of solidarity.