What is the role of an artist? A creative inquiry by Tala Justo
What is the role of the artist in society?
In 2021, I filmed myself dancing on my laptop.
I watch that video now and think I danced beautifully.
I move differently today.
I stopped training. Years passed. I returned.
Now, I sometimes struggle to remember the combination. I lose the counts. My body does not always do what I want it to do.
But I dance.
I spent three hours with my dance teacher working on my own choreographic choices.
And somewhere between learning how to make movement and wondering whether any of it was good, I kept returning to a question:
What is the role of the artist in society?
Does an artist need to help someone?
Change something?
Teach something?
Does art have to accomplish anything to deserve the space it takes up?
Or can someone make something beautiful without justification?
These questions feel especially complicated when I think about the words
maarte, pabibo, and pabida.
Words that make me wonder whether I am expressing myself or simply asking people to look at me.
Maybe both can be true.
I wrote this poem while thinking about what it means to call myself an artist:
Ako rin
What is art?
Kaartehan?
What is the artist?
Maarte lang?
Does this matter?
Am I doing anything?
Am I helping anyone?
Maarte lang ba ako?
Pabibo ba ako?
Pabida?
Am I making something because it needs
to be made
or because I need to be seen making it?
Am I taking up space?
Or taking too much space?
Who decided how much was too much?
Someone dances.
Ako rin.
Someone writes.
Ako rin.
Someone sings.
Ako rin.
Someone makes something beautiful
without justification.
Ako rin.
Someone speaks before being invited.
Ako rin.
Someone wants to be seen.
Ako rin.
Someone takes up creative space.
Ako rin.
Pabibo.
Ako rin.
Pabida.
Ako rin.
Maarte.
Ako rin.
I don't think I have an answer to what the role of the artist in society is.
Maybe the artist witnesses.
Maybe the artist remembers.
Maybe the artist questions.
Maybe the artist makes something beautiful.
Maybe the artist takes something they cannot explain with ordinary language and gives it a body, a sound, a sentence, a shape.
Maybe sometimes the artist helps.
And maybe sometimes the artist simply makes.
The videos accompanying this piece show me dancing years apart.
One is from 2021.
One is me now, returning to dance after years without training.
I could look at them and ask which version of me is the better dancer.
But I think I am becoming interested in a different question.
Why did I come back?
After all these years, why do I still want to move?
Why write poems?
Why choreograph?
Why make anything at all?
Maybe I make art because something in me keeps asking to be made visible.
Maybe that makes me maarte.
OK.
Someone makes art.
Ako rin.
Tala Justo is a Peter E. Haas Public Service Leaders Fellow with University of California, Berkeley serving at Queerly Complex for the 2026-2027 academic year. Tala is a friend, a mentee, my family’s eldest child of two, a sibling, a cousin, a nibling; a Filipino-American immigrant, political lesbian, a femme, nonbinary, someone with working-class roots, a beneficiary of upward social mobility, a City College of San Francisco graduate, a student at the number one ranked public university in the nation, a mental health consumer, and a Kapwa Care Collective Founder and Co-Director at student government in UC Berkeley.
Tala Justo was a College Corps Fellow at Queerly Complex this summer 2026 culminating in Walking Kapwa, a storytelling walking tour through memory and movement and online meditative reflection.
As part of their 2026-2027 Fellowship, Tala is co-producing a series of artist-based conversations with interns at the Filipino Mental Health Initiative that result in a five-part series of creative meditations on the intersections of identity, cultural and artistic practice, and arts development. The resulting creative work is published on the Queerly Complex blog as it is received, honoring the labor of singular body synthecizing a collective experience.
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