Abstract Oralities are spoken languages existing outside the framework of reading and writing – living through embodied articulations of marginalized bodies. “Saluhan" looks at oralities as potentiality, rather than the written and material residue of language and their agency as they narrate a diffused and transitive space of ‘commoning’ to ask: what happens to the mother tongue in diaspora? Does the tenacity of language spoken in migrant communities attest to resilience or perhaps a recognition of language in its fullest sense: as a site of power, identity, longing, memory?

“Saluhan” is a participatory artistic research project working with the Filipinx community (first and second generation) in Helsinki to observe the use of their orality, and how this generates an identity that is both inside and outside the scope of assimilation or assumed Finnish-ness. Emphasized here are methodologies of resistance (silence, opacity or refusal) and transformation (hybridity, slang, linguistic innovations) as participants navigate multi-faceted identities. Through intergenerational and multilingual encounters, “Saluhan" brings forward situated forms of knowledge and lifeworlds which are invisible within the Nordic labor paradigm.

The project worked with eight Filipinx families and their stories are presented as a performance lecture by Jay Albaos and Stephanie Misa. As artist-researchers with Philippine migration backgrounds, we work multilingually and relationally, drawing on shared cultural references such as cooking and eating together, karaoke, dancing etc. These elements function as epistemic anchors—material and affective carriers of conceptual worlds shaped by feminized labor export, racialized care economies, and extractivist legacies. Through co‑creation, “Saluhan" becomes a site where these worlds can be held, tended to, and made seeable and sayable. Saluhan proposes artistic research as a collective practice of care, resistance, and knowledge‑making.