An Explosion in Slow Motion

2026

An explosion happens in an instant. Here, this instant is stretched to days, reduced to a lingering cloud of sound.

On May 5th, 2026, the US military fired a Tomahawk missile on Philippine soil, the first in its history. The missile was launched from Tacloban airport, a civilian facility well outside the designated EDCA sites, and hit its target in Laur, Nueva Ecija, about 600 kilometers away. It is the same deadly weapon that left 150 people dead, mostly children and students, when it was fired by the US military at a girls’ school in Minab, Iran on February 28th this year.

This is a clip of the missile hitting its target. Using audio and video tools, the clip is warped to last 192 hours, until the piece is pulled out from the space.

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Part of the WhyNot MNL’s month-long program, Strategies of Deceleration (3 August to 3 September 2026), alongside works by Veronica Lazo, Tona Lopez and Issay Rodriguez.

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