PSONA — People’s State of the Nation 2025

A long-form documentary project following the People's State of the National Address (PSONA), an annual counter-protest where Filipino social movements gather to reject the government's official narrative and assert their own. Each year, as the President delivers the State of the Nation Address to Congress, tens of thousands of activists—peasant farmers, urban poor organizers, students, workers, Indigenous communities—march through Manila to declare the actual state of the nation: landlessness, militarization, imperialist intervention, and organized resistance.

Since July 2025, Geneciran has been building an archive of how communities perform resistance, create alternative political narratives, and embody collective power. PSONA functions as both spectacular ritual and strategic organizing—burning effigies of political figures, blocking highways, facing down police lines and water cannons, while organizational infrastructure (flags, banners, coordinated formations) makes visible the scale and sophistication of the National Democratic Movement in the Philippines. The images capture this duality: the spectacle of burning effigies alongside the intimacy of portraits of the farmers, youth, and elders who embody these movements.

Shot from within the march—embedded with peasant organizations including AMIHAN (National Federation of Peasant Women) and KMP (Peasant Movement of the Philippines)—the work documents resistance not as spectacle viewed from outside but as practice experienced from ground level. This positioning reflects Geneciran's ongoing relationship with agrarian movements through their dissertation research on rice and land politics in Central Luzon, where the camera becomes extension of ethnographic fieldwork.

The project engages collective memory as agential force: in the Philippines, mass organizations mobilize annually around commemorative dates—the end of Martial Law, the overthrow of Marcos, the SONA itself. But PSONA is not symbolic performance or discursive intervention—it is material organizing. The march consolidates demands that connect to ongoing campaigns for genuine land reform, against U.S. military bases, against extrajudicial killings of peasant organizers. Organizations coordinate across all sectors—Indigenous communities, peasant and environmental movements, women's organizations, labor unions, teachers, scientists, overseas migrant workers, youth and student groups—asserting presence despite state violence and building the infrastructures of sustained struggle. As the archive grows year by year (2025, 2026, 2027+), it will document how these material conditions—landlessness, militarization, imperialist extraction—persist and evolve, and how movements adapt tactics while maintaining organizational continuity.

The work argues against narratives of political closure: that national liberation movements dissolved at the "end of history," that agrarian struggle disappeared with modernization, that militancy is relic of Cold War era. These images show the opposite—the scale, organization, and persistence of anti-imperialist politics in the contemporary Philippines, where tens of thousands still march behind red flags, where peasant women still demand land reform, where youth still organize around principles written decades ago. The photographs document not nostalgia but living practice, not memory but present tense.

This series of fourteen images has been edited from over 700 photographs captured during PSONA 2025.