lani maestro’s No Pain Like This Body

October 2024

in dialogue with lani maestro

lani maestro, No Pain Like This Body, 2010; installation with ruby-red neon on wooden structure, 140 × 61 cm. Fifty-Seventh Venice Biennale, Italy, 2017. Photo courtesy the artist.

lani maestro is a multi-awarded Filipino Canadian artist who divides her time between Canada, the Philippines, and France. She works in installation, sound, video, bookwork, and writing. In 2018 she received an Honorary Doctorate Honoris Causa from NSCAD University in Canada. maestro’s engagement with Harold Sonny Ladoo spans decades, beginning in the 1980s with her first encounter with his 1972 debut novel, No Pain Like This Body. In 2010, the Filipino Canadian artist turned its title into the pair of red neon signs pictured above, which in 2023, following its installation in Vancouver’s financial district, was selected by an Artsy jury as one of the twelve best works of public art. In January 2024, I asked maestro to reflect on the creation and continued relevance of this work. Here is her response, compiled via email correspondence and in lowercase format, at her request.

Andil Gosine: How did you come across Harold Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body?

lani maestro: in the early eighties, i came across a copy of the book at a friend’s library in canada. i was attracted to the title right away. as i began to read, i was taken by the language. its uttering felt strange and seductive all at once. it felt somewhat subversive, as if it went astray from the conventions of the english language to recover another way of telling. there was something bodily in the experience that brought me to the “imperfect” english of my childhood in the philippines with the musicality of regional dialects and accents.

AG: What was it about Ladoo’s text that resonated with you?

lm: this was more that forty years ago, so i cannot remember most of it, but what remained with me was that the resonance was so bodily. it’s just an immediate image, but i guess what i felt was more of a feeling of rootedness to earth, some primal connection to chaos with bountiful beauty. an untamed sensibility that was also purely sensual. and so initially, when i was asked to do a work for a gallery located on the lower east side of vancouver, the string of words just kept repeating in my head as i walked down the streets. i felt like a stranger in this place where people created a different kind of economy to survive their poverty.

AG: Reflecting on your work years after its first and subsequent exhibitions, how do you feel about it now?

lm: i actually don’t feel like saying much, as the work seems to have a life of its own. experienced in a public site, for example, the work embraces its surrounding and vice versa. and then people seem to be able to connect their personal response to something more social or political. people react bodily, emotionally, and claim the work for themselves. for me, as an artist, it is a humbling experience of letting go of any kind of ego that accompanies a creative endeavor. the work in its physical and artistic manifestation seems to touch people in its abstraction, and that’s the beauty of it. there is an identification because the string of words evokes something that someone can feel instantaneously, but then it is disrupted by its twin neon’s rearrangement of the same words. hopefully, this creates a deeper reflection, an interrogation of some kind. what do the words mean in terms of one’s subjectivity? i guess that is the space that is most interesting for me—if language can take you there.

Andil Gosine is a professor of environmental arts and justice at York University and the author of Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

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