This keynote reflects on how the term overseas touches on the ecology of water and land and the migration of forms and people. Through the photographic medium that is imagined as formative, ecology and migration are brought together to evoke an archipelagic condition that is simultaneously diasporic and ancestral, geopolitical and mythopoetic. The lecture focuses on the practices of two Philippine photographic artists from different generations–Ricardo Alvarado and Nana Buxani—to flesh out the poetics of overseas in inter-cultural communities in the United States, the disputed maritime territory of the South China Sea, and the intricate waterways of Manila. Finally, it proposes the estuary as a contact zone between oceans and cities that indexes multiple inter-local and inter-island circulations.