Part of a series entitled Fever Dreams of Progress, Cian Dayrit's wall hangings feature archival photographs dating back to the period of the American colonization of the Philippines. These images literally ground the work in history, which Dayrit then annotates with embroidered text and illustrations, drawing attention to the environmental and human costs of capitalist progress. The first, which shows a row of peasant bodies lying in a field, critiques neoliberal developmental policies, which fail to preserve agricultural and forest land instead parceling it out to extractive, destructive, and profit-driven industries, as Dayrit's annotations highlight. The second addresses the harmful legacy of the so-called "Green Revolution," a push to industrialize agriculture across the Global South through the adoption of genetically modified high-yield seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and intensive irrigation and drainage technologies. In Dayrit's work, peasants tilling the field are shrouded in red barbed wire as green syringes rain down on them like bombs, the chemical plant (cynically labelled "research institute") looming in the background their most likely source [1].

_{[1] Green Art Gallery, “Hangama Amiri, Cian Dayrit, Melissa Joseph, Lebohang Kganye, Jagdeep Raina, Raed Yassin,” Ocula (Ocula, 2023), https://ocula.com/art-galleries/green-art-gallery/exhibitions/textiles/.}

Cian Dayrit’s work investigates notions of power and identity as they are represented and reproduced in monuments, museums, maps and other institutionalised media. His works often respond to different marginalised communities, encouraging a critical reflection on colonial and privileged perspectives in the Philippines and more broadly. His projects, which combine archival references, protest imagery and grassroots counter-mapping, show how empires scored out the maps of the modern world, how the aftermath perpetuates industrial development, and how alternative territories might be imagined from the ground up.

Blueprint of Dam as Sadistic Monument is a new commission for rivus drawing on Dayrit’s research, activism and community counter-mapping projects around five rivers across the Philippines. All are, or were, threatened by large dams that impede their flow and affect the communities and ecosystems they sustain. They are the Chico river dam/Ampit dam in the Cordillera region; Balog-balog dam in Zambales, Central Luzon region; Kaliwa-Kanan-Laiban dam in Tanay and Quezon provinces; Jalaur dam in Panay island; and Pulangi dam in Mindanao.

The large piece Tropical Terror Tapestry (2020) consists of a dense infographic quilted map that includes the current regime’s military enclaves and a topological overview of different counterinsurgency programs—technologies of state terrorism presently being waged against the “internal enemy,” the Filipino people. Embroidered side-panels depict diverse methods of militarism being used in these campaigns, as well as military camps, red-tagging of activists, forced displacement, and air raids against peasant and Indigenous communities—operations that have intensified during the Covid-19 crisis. For Dayrit, such topographical threadings are tools in themselves, anting-anting weapons of everyday artistry for self-education and resistance.