Bahala na: Fragments of memory and a surrender to uncertainty
Featuring the words and work of artist Sophia Rosenthal
In Tagalog, there’s a saying. Sometimes, it’s a hopeful manifestation. Other times, it’s a flippant remark.
Bahala na.
It’s a sister phrase of qué será, será meaning whatever will be, will be. Or perhaps more accurately, it’s up to fate. It’s a term and a belief that things happen as they should. Time will reveal whether it was the right call. Bahala na is something you might say right after adding an extra spoonful of fish sauce before tasting the broth. Or right before you hit send on that risky double text.
On one hand, there’s a feeling of resignation in the phrase. A fatalistic sense that a certain sequence of events must inevitably take place. That we as Filipinos are powerless against the almighty plans of the God of the Spanish. Trapped in the factory line of the American dream. Forever the victims of the feudalistic systems and class hierarchies left over and tended to by our colonial masters. So fuck it, do what you want. Nothing is in your control.
On the other hand, there’s something freeing, hopeful, optimistic — even romantic — about bahala na. Like, things just have a way of taking care of themselves. Like, you should always trust your instincts because it’ll lead you the right way. Like, what is meant for you will naturally find you.
The etymology of bahala na has roots in Sanskrit and Malay words meaning a unit of weight, a burden to pay. This tells us that the people on our islands have always carried the load of the unknown. Perhaps, due to our geography in the ring of fire where we are, and always have been, under constant threat from the unpredictable forces of nature and of man, living in our world has always taken its toll.
But it seems, we’ve endured for so long that somewhere along the way, that heaviness has turned into a lightness. We’ve surrendered to life’s mass, yielded to its weight. And now, we let it carry us wherever the wind blows.
In Sophia Rosenthal’s paintings, bahala na manifests through movement and gesture. It lives in the ‘accidents’ that she allows to remain visible. In the layers of latex resist that both reveal and conceal. In the compositional risks she takes, trusting that meaning will surface through process. It’s a faith that all the preparation, time and work that has come before will guide the next strokes of her brush. Will reveal the next part of the picture.
At the same time, Sophia’s practice is a return to blurry, splintered, patchwork memory. Living memory. Memory that moves. Ages. Changes. Sourcing family photographs and archival material, she magnifies abstract parts in mixed media to tell stories with no fixed narrative. Turning fragments into vessels of latency that are charged with feeling, yet resistant to full disclosure. Leaving interpretation not just up to fate, but up to every viewer.
“Working through them with painting, printmaking, and masking techniques, I try not to resolve but to remain with uncertainty.”
Through her work, Sophia reveals the reality of bahala na as the courage to hold on to the fragments we remember, good or bad, and still go forth in the face of the unknown. It is the cultural resilience that propels us forward, not in spite of uncertainty, but because we as a people are always living with it. It informs our relaxed attitude to life, not to be confused as a resignation to it. Bahala na gives us control — by allowing us to let go of it. It lets us live in the now, make decisions for today, and leave tomorrow’s choices up to tomorrow.
“My interest in memory is not to preserve it, but to explore its malleability, its gaps and glitches. Like bahala na, it is a way of being with uncertainty that is active, intuitive, and generative.”
While bahala na hopes for the future, Sophia’s work remembers and reimagines to create a mirror for the present. Allowing the work to change depending on who looks at them; shift depending on the hour of the day. Sophia creates images that are not absolute, just like bahala na can never be absolute.
“Through this lens, my practice is a negotiation between personal and collective memory, between the known and the unknowable — where meaning is not asserted but allowed to emerge.”
Bahala na is the forefinger and the middle finger, crossed. It is the silence we let linger. The space we allow for the structural things we can’t change to shape the lives we live. It is the room we leave for the unfamiliar and the new to bloom and become part of our story. Part of our who we are.
And though the past is as it was. Sophia reminds us that how we hold it — how we hang it on our walls — how we live with it is bahala sa atin. It’s up to us.
See Sophia’s work exhibited at Galerie C in Paris as part of the show ‘Between Lunch and Something Else’, opening on the 31st January.