Les Amacio’s Human(s) Are Fragile Too, a sculptural installation in the exhibition Cultural Workers: NOT CREATIVE? at the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art, reexamines the symbolic meaning of the balikbayan box. Traditionally seen as an emblem of deep family ties, generosity, and love, the box is transformed here into an allegory of labor, loss, and systemic neglect.

Through this work, Amacio maps the anatomy of sacrifice experienced by Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), confronting the public with three recurring forces: Pagod (exhaustion), Padala (the burden of sending remittances and goods), and Pagluha (grief or silent suffering). The installation challenges idealized narratives, instead offering a sobering reflection on the hidden costs of labor migration and the fragile realities endured by those who leave home in search of a better life.

“The work serves as both a memorial and a quiet protest—an invitation to reflect on the cost of labor, sacrifice, and systemic neglect,” said Amacio, and it invites the audience to confront the often invisible and unspoken realities faced by OFWs—those who endured abuse, both mental and physical, and those who lost their lives while working abroad. 

Using suspended balikbayan boxes as sculptural vessels, Human(s) Are Fragile Too unpacks the quiet violence of separation, the poetry of survival, and the labor of love and pain that often goes unseen—an invisible reality of the dark side of the Filipino diasporic experience, amplified by the lives of Mary Jane Veloso, Joselito Zapanta, Angelo dela Cruz, Sarah Balabagan, and Flor Contempacion.

Approximately 2.3 million Filipinos are employed overseas, with about 1.6 million working under formal contracts and another 700,000 as irregular or undocumented workers. These OFWs are spread across a wide range of global industries, including healthcare, maritime, construction and engineering, information technology and education, sales and service, agriculture and production, and domestic work. 

In 2024, OFW remittances reached a record high of ₱2.146 trillion ($38.34 billion), highlighting the continued economic contribution of overseas Filipino workers. Alongside this, an estimated 7 million balikbayan boxes were sent to the Philippines, each filled with goods, gifts, and essentials for their families. These boxes serve as tangible expressions of love and connection, reinforcing both the social and economic bonds between Filipinos abroad and their loved ones at home.

Also read: The Art of Lester Amacio, a Traversal into the Inner Self

Human(s) Are Fragile Too, however, reminds viewers of the price OFWs have to pay, and it challenges the oft romanticized view of OFWs as tireless modern-day heroes by the government and calls attention to its failure to protect its citizens in the global labor characterized by exploitation, oppression and abuse, legal and contractual violations, psychological breakdowns, indebtedness, and repatriation and reintegration issues, especially for Filipinos caught in conflict zones.

Rendered in neat white rather than the familiar brown, the boxes are stripped of nostalgia, revealing absence rather than abundance. They evoke not movement, but entrapment—memorials of burdened lives and constrained bodies with each belt tightening like the unseen weight of pagod—the exhaustion that accumulates in silence across oceans and the frustrations and disappointments of misuse of money from their labor by family members back home.

Marked “Fragile,” every box resounds with layered meaning. The word is no longer a logistical instruction to handle the boxes with care but a quiet reckoning. Our padala—the things we send—are often mistaken for love made visible, but what of the pagluha—the quiet weeping behind each remittance, each package, each sacrifice? 

Amacio conveys that each of the suspended boxes are not merely containers of imported Spam, Libby’s, Hormel, or Toblerone and Hershey’s; they also carry empty hearts suffered by loved ones overseas; allegorically, they are coffins. Memories. Warnings. They are shaped by the cost of absence—an inheritance of separation, of missed birthdays and graduations, empty chairs, and the erosion of the self.

Moreover, Human(s) Are Fragile Too emphasizes the cost of the absence of parents on children, and that cost is measured not just in lost time but in lives that became disposable in the service of global demand.

Drawing insights from Neferti X.M. Tadiar’s Life-Times of Becoming Human (2022) and Remaindered Life (2024), the Filipino diaspora and OFWs must be seen not as mere dispersal, but as a global infrastructure of racialized labor—an economy of care and servitude quietly propping up wealthier nations.

Tadiar reveals how Philippine labor export transforms citizens into instruments of capital, rendering their bodies useful only in their serviceability. This is not mobility—it is managed circulation.

The balikbayan box, central to Amacio’s installation, becomes what Tadiar calls an affective commodity: a vessel through which presence is substituted with goods, and love becomes legible only through consumption. While it may appear as a gesture of care, it is also a performance of economic participation, where the migrant’s absence is softened by the arrival of things. The box, then, does not only contain belongings; it contains the burden of pagod, the concealment of pagluha, and the quiet violence of a system that rewards productivity while erasing personhood.

At the heart of this is what Tadiar terms “remaindered life”—lives not meant to be fully lived, but rather spent, used, and forgotten. These are lives treated as surplus, as exportable labor, as collateral damage in the pursuit of global capital. When the balikbayan box begins to resemble a coffin, it is not metaphor alone—it is evidence. Each suspended cube in the installation holds the weight of that disposability. It asks us not only to see the fragility of migrant life but to understand why that fragility is made invisible—and at what cost.

By transforming the balikbayan box into a sculptural body—contained, suspended, and silenced—Amacio invited viewers to sit with discomfort. To feel the eerie silence of Gallery 3, a wake without people around. To think about the systems that turn warm intentions into cold transactions. To honor the Filipinos who gave everything and never made it home.

About Cultural Workers: NOT CREATIVE?

The exhibition Cultural Workers: NOT CREATIVE? opened May 17 and will run until July 2025 at the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art in Iloilo City. 

It features the works of 14 artists, namely: Ross Almendras, Les Amacio, Justin Amrhein, Ivy Marie Apa, Julio Jose Austria, Moreen Austria, Eric John Eigner, Ricky Francisco, Dave Lock, Rhaz Oriente, Jumjum Ouano, Benj Pore, Amiel Roldan, and RA Tijing.