Sitangkai

Sitangkai is the first chapter of an ongoing body of work titled 0 Meters Above Sea Level. A floating community where life exists entirely on water, in a fragile balance shaped by daily survival and increasingly threatened by rising seas.

Sitangkai is the first chapter of an ongoing long-term photographic project titled “0 Meters Above Sea Level.”

Sitangkai is a stilt village in the southern Philippines, built directly on the water. Daily life unfolds at the same height as the sea: children play, families cook, bodies move, grow, and survive in a space where land barely exists. Here, the boundary between home and ocean is fragile, porous, and constantly shifting.

This work does not aim to explain Sitangkai, nor to describe it through a documentary lens. Instead, it observes the quiet persistence of everyday life in a place that exists in a permanent state of exposure. The images focus on gestures, bodies, and small moments, allowing the viewer to experience the rhythm and vulnerability of this environment without narration or instruction.

0 Meters Above Sea Level is conceived as a multi-chapter project exploring communities living at the threshold between water and land, where rising sea levels, environmental degradation, and economic marginalization threaten to erase not only physical spaces, but entire ways of living. Sitangkai represents the beginning of this research: a point of entry into a broader investigation of human presence at sea level zero.

The project is a work in progress, developed over time through repeated visits and sustained observation. Rather than offering answers, the work invites questions about permanence, fragility, and the future of communities whose existence is inseparable from the water beneath them.