In 2010, after a successful bid to gain a seat in the Philippine House of Representatives, Imelda Marcos gave out a number of seashell decorated clocks with her face imprinted on them as a Christmas present to her fellow congressmen and women, including the artist’s father. Although his father immediately rejected the gift, for Pio Abad the gesture became symbolic of an insidious kind of soft power and the seashells a bizarre shorthand for ornament as corruption. In Decoys, a series of dummy CCTV cameras encrusted with tropical seashells, Abad applies this process of ‘decoration as corruption’ onto what he considers metonyms of state control and, in the process, creates failed objects – discrete and authoritative observers transformed into elaborate and decadent dummies.