Flora After 

Flora After explores how traces of U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines remain embedded within Philadelphia’s institutional archives. While researching local collections, Aquino Straus encountered photographs, botanical studies, and correspondence from the American and Spanish colonial era, materials that shaped Western knowledge of the Philippines but often obscured Filipino perspectives. Through the reenactment of real and imagined scientific studies, he asks us to consider our relationship to the natural world. 

Through an immersive video installation and expanded documentary, Aquino Straus reinterprets these archives through Filipino mythology, storytelling, and research into medicinal plants. Filmed across several Philadelphia institutions—including the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, the Wagner Free Institute of Science, University of Pennsylvania, and Temple University, as well as the artist’s grandmother’s garden in the Philippines. Flora After is Aquino Straus’ form of resistance, one that recalls the stories that were subsumed within the American colonial project and realizes them into new narratives that highlight the rich, ongoing traditions of the Philippines.