Condition: Religious trauma syndrome

Media: Audiovisual

Religious trauma syndrome (RTS) is classified as a set of symptoms, ranging in severity, experienced by those who have participated in or left behind authoritarian, dogmatic, and controlling religious groups and belief systems.

For this project, I wanted to choose a condition I can relate to. I feel art is more powerful when you’re making it from the heart, when you’re able to draw upon experiences you did have. I was born in the Philippines, and Catholicism is a central part of our culture. Even moving here, I was raised Catholic which made the expectations my family had on me difficult. I was expected to conform to their image of who I should be and not who I actually am. A deep fear of God and Hell was instilled upon me and it took some time in me during my teenage years to get over it. And discovering that I was agnostic and queer was my own journey, one where I had to find comfort in other places than my family for. I think exploring RTS for my project will allow me to draw upon my own experiences as a resource and create art that is very much personal to me for this project. I will do a photography series that incorporates themes of religious trauma and the church and repressed identity. I want each picture to be accompanied with a audio file correlating to its themes.