Para sa kasalanan ko

Para sa kasalanan ko examines the fragile, and often collapsing, boundary between girlhood and imposed womanhood in parts of Southeast Asia. The project moves through a liminal space where a girl can simultaneously occupy several roles at once: daughter, mother, sex worker, a body made available for survival.

Focusing on minors experiencing pregnancy and sex work, the project explores how these identities are not sequential but overlapping conditions shaped by family expectation, economic precarity, and state control. In many contexts, these pressures are further reinforced by moral and religious frameworks, where ideas of purity, shame, and duty blur the line between choice and obligation, and guilt becomes internalized at an early age.

I started engaging with girls during their coming of age years, often feeling emotionally close to who I once was at their age while simultaneously recognizing the immense geographical, social, and political distance between our realities. My practice unfolds through long term relationships and shared trust. I spend extended periods with the people I photograph, accompanying them through everyday spaces, from moments of intimacy to moments of survival. The photographic process itself often becomes performative and cathartic. Many of the girls actively participate in the construction of their images. They pose with a form of playfulness and performativity that echoes the fantasy associated with being seen by a camera, while simultaneously carrying the weight of adult responsibilities and violence imposed upon them far too early. I became conscious of my own position within these contradictions: witnessing them, moving alongside them and questioning the ethics and limits of representation itself.

The work interrogates the idea of choice, asking what autonomy means in environments where reproductive rights are restricted, poverty narrows possibility, and judgment falls hardest on the youngest bodies.