Sustainable Baddie of The Week: Em Bautista, creator of Mola Mola
Have you ever considered introducing yourself to the rats that live on your streets? Or making the acquaintance of the squirrel family in your backyard? Have you considered letting your neighborhood pigeons eat from your palm? After sitting down with Em, the creative mind behind Mola Mola, and diving into what it means to be on a quest to love even the grossest things, feeding pigeons doesn’t seem like such a wild act. Instead, the idea begins to emerge as an influential guide for restoring connection and healing our planet’s inhabitants. On our quest to love the earth, maybe loving the gross things is one unexpected ingredient in the elusive recipe for climate justice.
As individuals who care for the health of the planet, moving in love and with intention can guide us, however imperfectly, to new avenues for social and environmental healing, and build community along the way.
Em Bautista is a non-binary and Filipinx multi-media artist, a designer, an NYU graduate student, and a native New Yorker. At NYU, Em is enrolled in an interdisciplinary program to explore themes of multi-species entanglement, Filipinx diaspora, and disidentification through the medium of art. In addition to their work as a student, Em, under the title Mola Mola, upcycles thrifted and recycled clothing, hand painting them with patterns featuring fruits, animals, and other elements that may reflect identity. When they aren’t painting pants or making sculptures, Em can be found foraging for materials along the New York waterways or feeding the pigeons that live on their block. In Em’s atmosphere, diving deeper into fashion turned into a reflection on the restorative power of radical love. Through it, we can repair our relationships with our planet, the cities we call home, and the species who share these homes with us.
When asked how they find joy, Em didn’t skip a beat before telling us “by feeding the pigeons in my neighborhood”. They explained that recently, they have embarked on a self-instructed quest to love “things that are gross.” This quest is rooted in love and connection to animals, but also in the reclamation of New York City and of their own identity.
This quest to love the things that are gross expands far beyond feeding the pigeons to building art installations for rats, collecting trashed materials for sculptures, or hand painting thrifted or recycled clothing through Mola Mola.
Mola Mola, the title given to Em’s pant painting project, started a few years ago when Em was bored of a pair of their own pants. In an effort to restore some excitement and reclaim some drip, Em decided to paint them.
Living in a colonized country and being of a colonized identity, claiming a heritage and ancestry can be a difficult, complicated, and grief-ridden task. In a country powered by white supremacy, we are socialized to see certain identities as lesser, even when those identities are our own. Instead, Em is choosing to make their art a reclamation project. Most notable are the fruit pants, which feature hand-painted images of tropical fruits like dragon fruit, papaya, mango, and durian, which are fruits native to the Philippines and other Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) climates. For many of us, the foods of our homelands can be important symbols for connecting us to our own identities and celebrating the places that we call home. And like the places we call home, which are ever-changing and totally malleable, Em’s pants are meant to be wearable art that lives alongside us, changing and morphing and turning into something new as we wear them.
One of the most rewarding aspects of Mola Mola, in comparison to Em’s other expressive channels, is that it serves as an apparatus for sharing their art with others. Making pants for friends and others in their community serves as “an act of generosity,” they told us. It’s what keeps Mola Mola exciting. “Fashion is existence affirming.” Everyone wants to look good and feel good in what they are wearing, but that doesn’t mean you have to wear new things.
Having the ability to take a pair of someone’s pre-loved pants and turn them into something new that can live a whole new life of wear, while also affirming various levels of identity and origin, adds a whole other level to what fashion and style can mean.
Not only does the painting itself hold symbolism, but the piece, whether it was a hand-me-down, a previously loved pair of pants, or a newly thrifted find, has its own story. Em’s paintings give new life to every piece and everyone who wears the pants.
Beyond Mola Mola, Em is invested in multiple other avenues of creative practice. Em told us that “any medium I touch, I take to and love.” Lately, Em has found a lot of inspiration through sculpture, especially work that is made up of trash and recycled materials that they collect. Just over a week ago, on April 20th, Em was featured in a show at NYU called 2040 Now, a sustainability week showcase at Crafting Sustainable Futures Exhibition at the Bobst Gallery. Em showcased sculptures of New York City marine life made of trash materials that they foraged from the edges of the water in the city or from stores like Fab Scrap and Materials for the Arts. Their feature concluded with a 25-foot sculpture of marine life that was hung in the gallery. The sculpture at once celebrates one of many animal groups that we share a home with and asks us to re-configure what we mean by disposability— an act of breathing new life into things we think are no longer viable.
Throughout our conversation, Em returned to the concept of disidentification, particularly in relation to their experience as part of the Filipinx diaspora. In their thesis, Em is hoping to raise questions of disidentification for anyone who identifies with complex notions of origin and rootedness.
Disidentification is ultimately the reconfiguration of identity by asking questions like, What is identity? Within the negative space of identity, what concepts emerge? Can we define an identity for ourselves?
Em shared with us that they are hoping to explore the biased notions of home as being physically rooted by exploring how we and other species can grow outside of physical rootedness. Like plants growing in water or air, are we not also this mobile? Like trash that we reconfigure into artistic materials, how can we explore our identities outside of something that has been complicated and confused and colonized into something that is beautiful, explorative, and expressive? Em’s is a subversive and profound exploration, and ultimately, these questions culminate in a powerful example of intersectionality and sustainability.
Within sustainability, we are consistently subverting and uprooting retired notions of being and making in order to create new ideas that are softer and more generous to our planet and the resources that we have. These questions transfer to concepts of love, identity, and existence. For Em, sustainability is an act of “moving with intention and care and a strong sense of responsibility. Moving more lovingly and close to home.” When we move with more intention, we act with more awareness of our impact. When we move in love, we offer care and respect to all other beings around us and show them that we care about collective well-being. When we move closer to home, we make smaller impacts on our environment and tell our places of origin that we are here to care for them.
Through their art, Em asks others around them (animals, plants, and people included) how they want to be loved. When we ask this question, we will likely find answers that illustrate how to build more sustainable and eco-friendly spaces that are rooted in sharing resources rather than taking resources. Maybe it feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar to ask the rat in your trash bin how they want to be loved, but who knows what you might learn? Destabilizing heteropatriarchal, human-centric concepts of love opens our capacity for loving beyond the boundaries of our imagination. Let’s keep destabilizing what it means to love – by loving trash, loving animals, and loving ourselves, we may find new answers for healing.
You can find Em’s designs through Mola Mola on their Instagram, where you can also commission an original piece. Keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming line of pants that honor New York City as well as upcoming collaborations with other upcycling designers based here in New York, too.