The craft-y objects of Cian Dayrit often assume the form of embroidered textiles. As much a social activist and advocate as well as a visual artist, his practice collapses the various roles that he occupies, with fabric and needlework providing the material base for pointed commentary about the exploitation of indigenous communities, the abuse of land by political power, and the ravages of neoliberalism in his native Philippines.Tree of Death and Decay (2018), which originally formed part of a bigger installation, presents a textual cartography of various illiberal agents and realities that Dayrit views as contributing to the continued impoverishment of the Philippines, the majority of its people trapped in what he refers to as “semi-colonial and semi-feudal” structures. The arboreal motif is owed to the iconography of the Tree of Life in medieval visual culture, and the evocation of the theological symbolism of the arbor vitae provides a familiar pictorial syntax - the Filipinos being a staunchly Catholic people - through which the deleterious effects of imperialism are articulated