Saluhan is a Filipinx/o collective based in Naarm, Melbourne on Wurundjeri Country.

Saluhan was created to establish a network between creatives in Australia and the Philippines and has since expanded to include collaborative projects that combine arts, activism, and community development. 

Saluhan has previously facilitated Saluhan: A Filipino Community Arts Event (2019) for makers, artists, musicians, and local community in Melbourne, Adelaide and Quezon City (PH); Saluhan Virtual Gatherings (2020), bi-weekly online activist workshops exploring decolonial and anti-racist frameworks within the arts and Filipinx/o community; Agimat (2021) a series of printmaking workshops and an exhibition at Sunshine Print Artspace; Magkasama (2021 - ongoing), a monthly gathering to share in Filipino literature, film, music, and culture; and Barrio (2022 - ongoing), an artist-in-residence project at Siteworks and Footscray Community Arts.

Dialekto Artists >

Aida Azin

Aida Azin is an artist/community organiser based in Naarm/Melbourne and the founder of Saluhan Collective. Born to Iranian/Filipina parents and raised in an Australian context, Aida’s unique life experiences are melded with depictions of liminality, and attempt to reconcile losses that all diasporic bodies contend with. Aida has exhibited her paintings and installations at Fontanelle Gallery (SA), Format (SA), Blak Dot (VIC), Seventh Gallery (VIC), Project 20 (the Philippines), First Draft Gallery (NSW), FELT Space (SA), and Ace Open (SA), Bus Projects (VIC), and Yavuz Gallery (NSW).

MJ Flamiano

MJ Flamiano is visual artist, producer, and community arts worker of Anglo and Filipino ancestry with roots in Luzon and the Visayas. She endeavours to present critical and often playful investigations into sites and their cultural significance. She explores Filipinx histories and diaspora through solo and community projects in printmaking, video, installation and text. In 2021, she facilitated Agimat, a series of community screenprinting workshops at Sunshine Print Artspace (VIC). In 2022, she will undertake an artist and workshop residency at Watch This Space artist-run-initiative in Mparntwe/Alice Springs (NT).

Catherine Ortega-Sandow

Catherine Ortega-Sandow is a researcher and community practitioner currently based in Naarm (Melbourne). Catherine has a history of designing and delivering a range of place based community projects across Australia and Asia-Pacific, and works as an Advisor on a national initiative exploring mental health in communities. Catherine is a member of Saluhan, a Filipino/x artist collective, and is currently developing a public program of works by Filipino/x artists to be delivered in 2022.

Kenneth Suico

Kenneth Suico is a visual artist residing and working in Naarm/Melbourne. Born in Cebu, Philippines, Suico jumps across a broad range of mediums, applying the modes of video, pop song performance, and installation into their practice. The act of repurposing, and the appropriation of what is considered western-based mythology narratives and imagery, and skewing it into their personal history and cultural superstitions, are common motifs in their works.

Kuya Neil

Kuya Neil is a Filipino electronic producer based in Narrm, Australia. His production work blurs the lines of contemporary club, underground hip hop and dance music. He has been releasing solo electronic music independently since 2018 and has worked with underground artists such as Teether, Papaphilia, Mulalo, Racerage and the 9 piece rap collective Fanau Spa (NZ). In 2021, he released a mixtape titled Glyph with underground rapper Teether (X-Amount) by long running Australian indie label Chapter Music. Outside of his music practice, Neil is involved in community music education, running free electronic music workshops. He coordinated numerous programs on music production and DJing as an organiser of Melbourne Sound School in 2018 and 2019, and continues to teach music production as a freelancer.

Bea Rubio-Gabriel

Bea Rubio-Gabriel is a performance artist, writer, and curator born in the Philippines, now based in Naarm/Melbourne. They explore the Baybayin script in how it can be activated as a gateway to rebuild cultural connections through performance, and approach writing as artform and ephemera. Exploring systems of care and Resistance Aesthetics, their curatorial process is grounded in rhizomatic forms of care and collectivisation. Exhibition-making practices also become a medium, a subversion of current curatorial and euro-centric art models through formal and material proposals. Their research focuses on the politics of translation, pre-colonial writing systems (namely, Baybayin), and Indigenous (Ifugao) knowledge systems of the Philippines.

Rio Ramintas Withall

Rio Ramintas Withall (they/them) is a Filipinx-Australian freelance Graphic Designer and food advocate based in Naarm (Melbourne). They focus their work across grassroots and community-led organisations. Rio is currently working on a Filipinx cookbook - Kamay, which aims to share, connect and uplift Filipinx people in the diaspora by using food as a way of resisting, healing and connecting to lineage.

 
Featured homepage video by Vanessa Napiza, 2019, Saluhan - A Community Arts Event, filmed at The Night Heron in Footscray.