The word “tropics” has always carried a double weight in the Western world. It has been sold as paradise, employing the image of a kind of abundance demarcated by palms and blue waters. And yet, it has also served as shorthand for danger, extraction, and disposability. Beneath this glossy surface lie the subterranean realities of diaspora; the labor, loss, and dislocation that have long sustained imperial fantasies. Long before the tropics was allowed to speak for itself, it was already being imagined and consumed by empires. A World of Islands: On Palms, Storms & Coconuts, now on view at the Ateneo Art Gallery, proposes the tropics as an archipelagic condition shaped by movement, climate, labor, and the long afterlives of colonialism. Curated by Ligaya Salazar and first presented at the Stanley Picker Gallery in London, this Manila iteration gains a sharper political and emotional charge. In the Philippines, where water..
