Measuring 7.5 meters by 25 meters, the mural titled “Bones of Our Elders” (or “Tul-an sang Amun Kamal-aman” in Hiligaynon) depicts “a sinuous serpent deity associated with the moon alongside imagery of local figures, community traditions, ancient cultivation practices, and spiritual beliefs.”

Four members of the Kikik Kollektive—Marge Chavez, Noel Epalan Jr., Kristine Buenavista, and Marrz Capanang—transformed the blank wall at the Level 3 gallery of QAGOMA in Brisbane, Australia, into a mural with a metanarrative on the impacts of capitalism and globalization on land, culture, and community life, mirroring their home country’s political and economic distress under Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and reflected in their province’s rising inflation at 4.4%, two notches higher than the national average of 2.5% despite postpandemic recovery. 

In underscoring landlessness, the mural asserts: “What is truly lost—in a highly globalized world lured to believe that the parameters for national wealth are mass production, extremely advanced technology, extracted terrains, corporate capitalism, and towering buildings—is the freedom to connect with the land.”

The artists painted the mural intending to connect people to their lands: “Through this connection, we reclaim the power of our many-voiced local earth—its myths woven through the curiosities and imaginaries of our ancestors, its abundance and healing in the presence of food, ethnopharmacology, and regenerative seeds.” 

The mural invokes the knowledge and values of the past while serving as instigator in the dialogue for decolonization. For the group, “decolonizing ourselves must move forward in the direction of our land’s diversity and generosity, so we can revere the places that hold us.” 

Community lens

Kikik Kollektive has been known for making large-scale murals since its formation in 2017 as “Artivism Iloilo.” Its transformation into Kikik Kollektive is underpinned by the mission to connect with the locals, artists, and grassroots organizations of the region to draw attention to social and environmental issues through a community lens.

“Kíkik” is Hiligaynon for “cicada,” which is also called “serum-serum” or cricket. It was adopted as the name of the art collective, drawing meaning from the insect’s loud chatter to symbolize the artists’ stimulating dialogue and exchange in the community. It signifies their unassailable connection with their home province of Iloilo on the island of Panay in the Philippines. 

Kikik Kollektive’s murals are rich in historic-cultural and sociopolitical themes. Its artistic style entices audiences from all walks of life to engage with the narratives it conveys, using public art as an information and education channel to empower citizens.

Teresa Magbanua

“Bones of Our Elders” is relevant public art with its powerful imagery and messaging, echoing the cries from the remotest of communities in the Asia-Pacific to the world through the portrayal of the much-admired heroine Teresa Magbanua of Pototan, Iloilo, woven through the enduring symbols of the Bakunawa, a Visayan serpent deity, and completing the rendition with the Filipino value of community collectivism called “bayanihan.”

The mural stands as a poignant tribute to Magbanua, the military leader, teacher, and farmer who epitomizes the spirit of resistance against colonial forces. Her legacy as a veteran of the Philippine Revolution against Spain (1896-1898), the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), and the Japanese Occupation (1942-1945) resonates as a powerful symbol of resilience and dedication to both her country and its people.

In “Bones of our Elders,” Magbanua is envisioned as a monumental female figure, an emblem of steadfastness whose efforts to protect the farmers (the custodians of the land’s bounty) and the Aeta (the island’s indigenous people) are magnified. She is not merely a historical figure but a living embodiment of the enduring connections among people, place, and the cultivation of both land and spirit.

Dominating the composition is the Bakunawa, the mythical serpent deity of the Visayan pantheon. A primordial force whose undulating motions dictate the cycles of time in the ancient Panayanon calendar, the Bakunawa is more than a celestial figure: It is an ancestral presence. 

Revered in Philippine folklore, serpents like the Bakunawa are linked to both agricultural rituals and spiritual practices, embodying the spirits of ancestors (anito) across the Visayan region, including Iloilo. Through this depiction, the coiled form of the Bakunawa becomes a symbolic conduit that ties together the people, the land, and the spirit world in a timeless dance.

At the heart of this narrative is the spiritual landscape of the Philippines, grounded in indigenous belief systems. Here, the Babaylan (an empowered shaman who bridges the physical and spiritual realms) performs sacred healing rituals, often in proximity to the Lunok tree (also known as the Balete or weeping fig, and believed to be a sanctuary for the supernatural). This tree, a sentinel of the unseen, serves as a gateway between the human and spiritual worlds, its roots deeply entwined with the practices of ancestral worship and healing.

Collective strength

“Bones of our Elders” also celebrates the collective strength of bayanihan, the Filipino tradition of communal unity. In one of its vignettes, a community comes together to move a house—an act both literal and symbolic, reflective of a time when village dwellings, constructed from locally sourced materials like bamboo and nipa palm, were easily moved from one place to another or reassembled through collective effort. This shared labor transcends mere cooperation, becoming a representation of the enduring values of solidarity, interdependence, and the spirit of mutual aid that bind a community together.

In its entirety, the mural weaves together threads of history, myth, and spirituality to honor a heroine whose legacy is as vast and enduring as the land she protected. It is a testament not only to Teresa Magbanua but also to the timeless bond between the Filipino people and their ancestral roots, both physical and spiritual.

70 artists from 30 countries 

In the Triennial, Kikik Kollektive represents the Philippines and is among the 70 artists, collectives and projects from more than 30 countries that include Dana Awartani (Saudi Arabia/Palestine), Brett Graham (Aotearoa New Zealand), D Harding (Australia), Mit Jai Inn (Thailand), Saodat Ismailova (Uzbekistan), Dawn Ng (Singapore), Yeung Tong Lung (Hong Kong) and Haus Yuriyal (Papua New Guinea).

The QACOMA says the Triennial is a gateway to the rapidly evolving artistic expression of Australia, Asia and the Pacific, and brings a compelling new art to Brisbane. Alongside artists and makers whose works have not been previously seen in Australia are new co-curated projects investigating artforms and cultural contexts rarely encountered outside their home localities.

“Bones of Our Elders” was completed with the support of local artists, Steven Falco, Amihan Aquilizan, and Imogen Corbett, and under the supervision of the curatorial team, Abby Bernal and Tarun Nagesh, curatorial manager of Asian and Pacific art. 

The exhibition statement in English was written by Jocelyn Flynn and translated to Hiligaynon by Kristine Buenavista with the assistance of Gil Montinola.

The project was supported by the Australian Government through its Office for the Arts, part of the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts.

The Triennial was opened to the public for free on Nov. 30, 2024, and will be on display until April 27.

Read more: My island of Marinduque is a bleeding heart

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Salvatus created what he called stone sculptures that forested the exhibition space of Arsenale, a place of former sylvan culture and eventually an arms factory, but now being wiped out and beginning to sink because of urban modernity. In the transformation of a former artillery production into a place filled with boulders that also morph into a sonic medium, Mount Banahaw is not only a fortress, a forest, and a sacred site, especially as it allows the brass saxophones to protrude out of the stone’s body; it is also a site of an alternative ecology that performs a different sonic history and vocal narrative of what shapes and makes the Philippines, a narrative that can be found behind the curtain of the nation-state, the theaters of war, and the proscenium platforms of the modern polis. 

By unfurling this imaginary temporal concealment, Salvatus leads us to go behind the curtains of our times, his home province, Quezon, where he not only tells us stories about the folk and their mystical accounts but also shows us how to visualize a different art history defined by the community members organically motivating one another to sustain the magic of Mount Banahaw, the presence of its rich biodiversity and, at the same time,  the location of a curatorial exhibition within a mountain geography. It expands our imagination of the process of art production beyond the reliance on human beings as the agent of creation. Instead, the beauty from a work that charms us is also shaped by the ecology of the place, the natural environment, the forest dwellers, and the very writing dramatized by the earth’s mountain. 

Concrete proof

In this case, the exhibition somehow reclaims concrete proof of the civilizational achievement of the Roman empire right at the core of the Venice Biennale. After all, Salvatus’ stone sculptures document the barbarism of the anthropogenic activity, making these stones symptomatic of the potential disappearance of such a landscape. The stone sculptures appear dispersed across the space, framed by white industrial curtains, with a film that somehow shows the archive of Quezon’s cultural past. In the distribution of stone sculptures, the center allows itself to turn into a natural living room where one can lean or sit on the stones, and then relish the moving image that contains accounts from Salvatus’ grandfather, the archives of the music band that plays perhaps in the town fiesta that is Lucban’s Pahiyas, showing the forest world of Mount Banahaw, peopled by archives and stories by the folk of Quezon and Laguna, apart from the trees and the natural vegetation. 

But in the verdant green that colors such a world, these stone sculptures also appear as figures shaped by the very people’s archives imagined and made to be moved by Salvatus. These stones, as they get dispersed along with the music and canvas of paintings, show how the Quezon folk cultivate their agrarian world as they define themselves with this forest and mountain, and also mark how the forest mountain in itself is becoming a fortress, a defensive space, and the people’s guardian. By making the geographic space function as a means to fence off danger, the thought is also elicited that the exhibition bears a threat and fear. 

More so, if every artwork becomes a contemporary document of the times, this exhibition also incites us to think of the potential disappearance of such a world, which Salvatus wishes to stop from happening, delaying the possible extinction, making the forest world of this mountain last longer through moving images, stone sculptures, art installation, and paintings—the very space that has allowed him to appreciate art. 

‘Dangerous wastelands’  

From this angle, Salvatus, with Quijon’s poetic curation, gives us an alternative world, which has been for the longest time, coming from Robert Pogue Harrison, “the shadow of the civilization.” Thus, from the other side of the curtains, the exhibition becomes the continuing legacy of Hermano Pule, an anticolonial figure who sought refuge in this hidden world. Yet precisely, with his discontent towards the Spanish colonial order, this world remains to be viewed with suspicion, as a hideout for the modern state’s fugitive and, at the same time, a place that the state wishes to extract, especially as seen by forest scholar Jaboury Ghazoul, “dangerous wastelands that are an impediment, even embarrassment, to human progress. 

If the forest remains to function as an obstacle in the larger projects of modernity, the ideas, images, and histories given an afterlife in such a world may always be, in fact, a reversal of the critique of Jason Farago. Most artmaking from the postcolonies—which have been at large forested, shaped by mountains, made to survive through plantations and the agricultural economy—will always be a process that somehow performs what Farago despises as the “art of turning backward.” 

After all, the return to the so-called backward life is also a defensive mechanism of the planet to protect itself from the hubris of anthropogenic activity. This also allows the people of these parts to imagine, to borrow from Arundhati Roy, the art in the small things, making the art production decolonize the modern man as the artist by allowing the lifemaking of the folk in the forest world to reorient our very visual language. Through these “backward” worlds, we get a glimpse of potential artmaking, which underlies that the very practices of anticolonial resistance hidden in this part of the world, behind the curtains of the modern present, can also be about an art practice of making a sovereign world, depending not only on state power but also on the generosity and magic of forests and mountains. 

‘Amateur’

It comes as no surprise that Salvatus uses found objects as the basis of his artmaking, which can be understood as natural to one’s environment. Precisely, the idea of nature is also something that Salvatus shapes for us to think deeply about what is familiar and natural—ideas that some fail to appreciate, such as the complexity of his shows (for example in the Drawing Room, Relaxation is a State of Mind). Others easily denounce some of his paintings as “amateurish,” and subsequently demand clarity without relying on the historical background that shapes his practice, which makes her light the fire by issuing negative verdicts without sensitivity to subjects and processes that can be as complex as the world of Mount Banahaw and the lifeworld of Quezon. 

Yet in such a critique, I find it surprising that we still think our critical acumen can be fleshed out by categories like the amateur. At the same time, with the regime of poststructuralism, it can be baffling that others still view clarity as the highest virtue. If we are expecting such ideals to be performed by an artist, what can now be understood as a matured practice of painting? If we extrapolate such a charge, what can be classified as the artist’s stage of professional maturity? By expecting an evolutionary trajectory of an artist towards a mature and somehow accessible substance and presence, what has happened to the very pursuit of an aesthetic education that springs from an experience of play? What kind of new ecology are we now expecting when we desire maturity and transparency from the artist? Are we not leading ourselves towards the global death of imagination? 

Such a critique of some of Salvatus’ works—the use of found objects, and recently, the stone sculptures—somehow also shows his attempt to challenge an art ecology and market. When we expect artists to perform a level of mastery or expertise, Benjamin Court recovers the earlier precept when someone is called an “amateur,” which is a form of “artistic amateurism” in the context of music, asserting its meaning as a form of challenge to “established musical knowledge,” especially as the word evokes “primitivism” that can also signify as a “celebratory term.” Harnessing the sediments unearthed by Court against the kind of critique, this insight allows us to seize the obverse side of amateur as also a form of critique, especially as it is advanced with a political perspective that can be informed by antiracism and a critique of capitalism. 

In this manner, dismissing the works of Salvatus can expose the critic’s predilections towards artworks that may have been stabilizing the institutional norm of art production, and, at the same time, a preference for a kind of art that does not subvert the reactionary status quo. 

Using vocabularies like “amateur” and “primitive” to express critique somehow also unravels an impasse that the same critical practice advances, failing to recognize that the amateur and the primitive are also the cultural legibility of black and brown folks. This means that established knowledge will always be insufficient when it comes to explaining and valuing the works of the colonial Other, especially if such works wrestle with a tunnel vision that James Scott criticizes as a form of “seeing like a state.” 

Thus, to be an amateur and primitive may also mean not seeing the forest for the trees, and by denying such dynamism and complexities of such worlds, we might end up having critical processes that only seek logics of typification instead of expanding our worldviews, including the utopic wish of decolonizing art. After all, for subjects like Quezon and the Sierra Madre in particular, that appear, figure, and morph into stone sculptures, we get to trace what Andrew Matthews calls “ghostly forms,” manifesting on the one hand as “traces of past cultivation” and, on the other, “partial relations between multiple actors” who “are constantly changing as a result of relations with others.”

Seeing and hearing

Precisely, with the kinetic force that shapes the creatures who inhabit such a world, Salvatus’ participation in the Venice Biennale with the curatorial direction of Quijon shows the broader practice of building an interlink between their respective art and curatorial practices with the broader landscape of Others. These Others unfold into multispecies relations, including the nonhuman life, and by having such breadth of connections, the art practice in this exhibition activates not only our ways of seeing but also our ways of hearing. 

In hearing, after all, for François Bonnet, one experiences where creatures “leave a trace.”  The idea of trace, in fact, for Salvatus, as he said in an earlier interview with John Balaguer, is the “idea of belief, similar to sound or music,” which “is something that cannot be grasped but instead travels through the air, creating new imaginations.” Salvatus, as a result, turns listening into a process of visualizing the enchanting powers of Mount Banahaw, which also reveals the complexity of curatorially exhibiting this lifeworld by animating the interrelations of sound and image within the broader scope of human and nonhuman. 

Yet with the presence of a sonic flux, especially as the marching bands perform within the sonic world of Lucban, Mount Banahaw unfolds into a composition of more than human worlds where the flows of nature, images, and sound lead us to an experience of synesthesia: The stone sculptures appear as a sound-image, embodying the crossovers of sensory feelings that intersect with the binaries of man versus nature, human versus nonhuman, art and nonart, living and nonliving. The stone sculptures also serve, just like the mythology of sound, as an echo of the long crossovers that can be traced back from the earliest volcanic flows of Mount Banahaw, and at present, its immanent force unfolds into a curatorial exhibition shaped by the force of nature. Salvatus’ stone sculptures and Quijon’s curatorial imagination create an analog to imagine the weathering process, the longer geological historical time, and man’s breathing as the conveyer of sound that names, echoes and shapes the image of such world and history to the present. 

Sa Kabilang-tabing ng Panahong Ito is an effort of Salvatus and Quijon to let Quezon and Venice come together in a relational flow, allowing the memories of volcanic flow and lush vegetation of the Philippines to grow and flourish in the exhibition spaces of Italy—a curatorial exhibition enabling us to seize the mountain forest and sinking island, the revolutionary Quezon province and the cosmopolitan island of Venice, the geologic past of these same cities and the shared anthropocentric present. 

All these happen as Mount Banahaw finally flows into this curatorial exhibition and eventually spills its presence in Venice as Salvatus and Quijon lift the curtains of this age, revealing the hidden geological past, and opening the promising worlds kept hidden by our ambitions of control, showing how our anthropocentric selves would always be displaced by nature, our environment, and the flows that emit from volcanos that morph into mystical mountains. 

We thank Salvatus and Quijon for lifting the curtains of this age, for the world to hear and see.

Jose Mari Cuartero is an assistant professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the University of the Philippines Diliman.

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I view these questions as urgent with the return of Jon Cuyson to Vargas Museum of the University of the Philippines Diliman with Taong Dagat, a queer modernist hydrofiction, giving vitality to surfaces, images, objects, and cinema as tactile points one can anchor on while navigating the exhibition to generate stories and understand what constitutes the sea people. 

In the tropical seascape created in the museum, the ocean mutates into an agent that waters further the artist’s creative vision, leading him to curate an exhibition that wishes to repair our long-lost aquatic affinity and kinship with the ocean lifeworld. Having such desires in Cuyson’s hydrofiction, the exhibition responds to the problem that Bruno Bosteels identified, in which the people have never been complete and finite, and in every attempt to define them, a split slithers through its fabric of social formation, leaving a tare in every desire to unify them. 

Since the split becomes an inherent process in our attempts to define people, this nature also fuels further the divide between land and sea, humans and animals, men and the rainbow community, along with other binarisms set by the modern world. In this manner, with the flawed nature of the very process of unifying the people, such a conceptual gap grants space for Cuyson to fluidly soften the internalized logics of boundaries inherent in the formation of people and queer the differential relations that we anchor on, especially in specific signifying efforts across the hardened linguistic and visual divides: land and sea, human and sea creatures, and people and the nonhuman. 

In the attempts to make boundaries porous and less rigid, the museum space situates Cuyson’s artistic practice as fluid art matter that can dissolve and mediate binaries that haunt and divide people, and allows his artistic imaginary waters to fluidly move across the museum space, appear like a flooding of the floors, turning the concrete dry floors into an ocean world, inviting our collective presence to evolve into a state of buoyant ontology. 

Social relations

The buoyant ontology is a conceptual proposition one can imagine by diving into Cuyson’s works. The works trace fragments of our contemporary ontology, specifically situated in the current ecology of extinction. This idea is informed by how the exhibition presents water as not only restricted to being understood as a resource. Instead, the water morphs into a medium of social relations, facilitated by the flows, showing how people of the sea cannot be defined solely by heterosexual reproduction. 

Cuyson’s Untitled SOS Movement #17, an installation framed by white paintings, made much more playful by the presence of coconuts arranged along with lubricant, digital technology, resin-made mussels, microphone, jasper stones, bottles of Datu Puti vinegar, and water jugs, morphs from being a collection of a fisherman’s quotidian belongings into a humble sea vessel. Yet it also reflects and mirrors the viewers as the vessel is framed and made to shimmer with the luminous metallic sheet on the side; at the same time, viewers may imagine the buoyant state of the vessel, crossing the ocean, carrying such items as it moves in the form of a boat, a raft, and other means of maritime transportation. 

Thus, we can also imagine the objects as things that can be consumed and embodied by people, especially with the ocean’s ability to facilitate the distribution of these objects across the world and be seen by their color, presence, and utility. These objects cannot escape the maritime industry, and precisely, being entangled with the planet’s natural wealth, these objects also collectively bear, embody, and perform a liquifying ability. The hydro turn in our visual culture points out that we have interiorized boundaries and borders enabled by landlocked imagination. But the objects we enjoy on dry land would never reach us by land alone; the mobility of goods is also made possible by the sea. 

The sea has been an earth matter that also shapes our ontological existence as it replenishes a lot of our objects that we can see in Cuyson’s makeshift vessel, by enabling them to be buoyant, cross bodies of water, and actualize our ability to manifest our desires, especially that such a crossing needs the fluidity of the water matter and the social relations in between. Through the sea’s unrecognized presence, we fail to acknowledge how it has been allowing us to surface above the world and embody an ontological existence capable of surviving the world’s rising sea level. 

With the influential role of the ocean in Cuyson’s artistic consciousness, works like Untitled Fictional Feelings #30 simulate the logic of the liquifying ability of water. This can be seen as an installation that humbly situates the paintings as a flesh-colored base of a pedestal, with the jasper stones being exhibited, making it also an alternative canvas, turning the stones into an abstract painting. To the left of this work, the SOS Taong Dagat Hole Painting Series appears as polymorphic paintings in which they manifest as corroding metal surfaces, frozen metal sheets washed away by either snow or the seminal fluid after a successful coital event, and at the same time, rustling colored windows.

‘Vibrant matter’

Cuyson’s works exude a malleable nature, and with this capability, these objects also invite us to recognize an ontology dissolving the visual utility of such pieces, watering and melting their respective reified presences and forms. These works unravel how objects in relation to water cannot be merely byproducts of our extractive relations with nature and the environment. Instead, the mutable power of the objects can also liquefy our expected relations with the museum environment by inviting us to enter the space by withdrawing from our ocularist tendencies. We have to awaken what Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter,” which is inherent in the objects as the paintings can motivate our bodies to entertain our repressed desires, acknowledge the generated affective power of the object, and feel the works’ liberating power. 

It comes as no surprise that Cuyson’s objects are also totems, objects of witchcraft and folkloric magic. The magic may manifest in Untitled fictional Feelings #6, where a seafarer’s bodysuit is left hanging on a metal clothes rack, and Untitled SOS Movement #4, which appears with jasper stones with a can of Spam or a hard hat while being contained by a luggage belt. Both works reveal how, apart from being solid matter, they also embody a force that radiates an enchanting effect or emancipatory volition. For example, if we pay attention to the bodysuits, these clothes worn by sea people have been the only material that shelters them in weathering the storm from the unpredictable and destructive ocean. In the case of others, this is the only material they embody as they live and survive as modern castaways especially as they labor far from their land, family, and traditional grounds of stability and safety. 

These objects emit an energy that empowers their users and, thus, as the stones embody their mineral nature and charm, while packed along with canned goods, we are also invited to enter the streams of our consciousness, which can be also waterlike, allowing us to entertain the semiotic shifts. The shifts become much more glaring as Cuyson’s Untitled Sailor #19 black and gray foregrounds the traditional metaphors of bondage and oppression such as the chains. But these chains deceive us as they eventually appear as a soft sculpture, allowing tenderness and desire to be always possible, softening anything hard that restricts us. 

Imminent force

The ways of seeing Cuyson’s works can never be singular, and in the multitude of visual meanings, the objects serve as a medium where the message unfolds by showing how one’s desire operates as a force that can be a steady stream of flowing water or a penetrative smash of a wave, making objects, to borrow from Bennett, as always out of one’s side, yet constitutive of the very life the sea people make. In this manner, things constitute people, and the objects in this exhibition are not only liquid in their malleable capability but also perpetually hold the magic of being trans. 

The trans, in this exhibition, unfurls as an imminent force that allows the queerness to vibrate into a rhythmic charge, palpable in the curatorial arrangement of the works. After all, for trans poet, theorist, and critic Jaya Jacobo, the queer comes to light as contiguous with trans folks — a revelation and an acknowledgment of a kind of relations that most cannot imagine and comprehend, always being pushed to be dismembered and bordered from one another, instead of being intimately in solidarity, especially with the hegemonic appeal of masculinity whose premise of existence is to deny and negate everyone, specifically women. Jacobo’s intersectional imagination of the feminine in the lifeworld of trans against the policing mindset of machismo magnifies Cuyson’s intervention as an act of participating in solidarity-building by gesturing towards a perceptive affinity, which withdraws from the monumental edifices of manhood, patriarchy, and machismo.

Cuyson’s intervention manifests in Glory, an animation with a hole burrowed into the middle of the screen that appears like a black hole at the center, signifying a mere dot, an opening, or for others with a queer playful mind, a glory hole, especially as the mark at the center deepens into the cavernous cave. The hole’s presence also makes the visualscapes of seafaring pass through it as if leaving a trace on the subjects who also manifest in the screen as an entity naturally bearing a lacuna, which can be also imagined as a lack, something missing, and even a remainder. 

This visual characterization, akin to Jacobo, invites us also to consider structural facets of these animated images as having their interiority, a loob, an unknown interior world of the hole, but also juxtaposed with the manifest presence, palabas. An interior-exterior spatial relation becomes also a process of embodiment, displacement, and oscillation. The relations of loob and palabas stage a phenomenological presence where the hole becomes not only limited to penetrative experience enforced by masculinity. Instead, the hole is a performance of the unfulfilled gap that masculinity wishes to efface by virtue of one’s omniscient phantasm. 

Yet Cuyson invites us to imagine the flirtatious ability of the queer who can go around the hole, and penetrates it at times, a lifemaking in a protracted process, acknowledging the holes as, not a defect, but a curve that one can transcend, survive, and shape into a new being unto the world despite all the impossibilities laid upon them. The trans, in this case, will always be a qualitative trace that enables the peoplehood in the sea a buoyant presence. 

‘Trancestors’

This argument becomes much more persuasive with Isola Tong’s decolonial imagination of our teleology, a “trancestral past.”  In the process of resurrecting the banished lifeworlds of the postcolonial Philippines, Tong conjures the narrative of the babaylan, our trancestors, and reconstitutes such past by teasing the feminine of such history through the balangay, a mother vessel, or what she calls a “Vulvic Boat,” showing how “the whole world is our homeland.” 

Tong’s trans reclamation of our barangay society enables us to highlight the transhistorical undercurrent of the moving image and filmic practice of Cuyson, which gives much robust meaning to his transculturation of narratives, from Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest to his own Kerel, and now, Wet Dreams. This work, Wet Dreams, is a digital video, like his filmic practice before, that resurrects found footage, and allows Lamberto Avellana’s film, Badjao: The Sea Gypsies, to appear once again, capturing the sea gypsies on the raft while juxtaposing images of the standoff between the Philippines and China in the West Philippine Sea. 

This reel of images allows us to seize a potential narrative in which the Badjao also bear the trace of our unrecognized trancestors who could provide an epistemology to enlighten us in conversations about our highly masculine notions of territorial sovereignty. Precisely, just like the character of the film, Kerel, who situates us as receivers and spectators of his dreams that are watered by the ocean, but also because of the pun one can derive from the title, the bodily discharge during one’s intense nocturnal pleasure. Kerel’s character traces the ambition and the desire at the same time, which can never be fixed and rigidified. 

Having such unbounded personhood, Kerel serves also as a relational figure who, drawing from Emmanuel David, allows us to wish and envision a co-existential relationship with one another, which also ultimately enables us to envision what Tong calls a “trancestral gathering.” It is a gathering that allows the people to emerge, whether as trans or queer, bringing back our individual separated lives with the people that can be as large as the sea. Such scale is propelled by how this moving image also serves as an archive of people’s fluid narratives, making the moving image the vessel and medium for people’s stories to be told. The moving image becomes Cuyson’s mechanism to narrate a potential hers- and transtory, not being submerged under water, but visibly buoyant in our waking everyday consciousness. 

Cuyson’s Taong Dagat is a curatorial exhibition that desires to develop a relationship of the people with the sea, a kind of poetics of relation, to borrow from Edouard Glissant, for the sea has been always the place of an “open boat,” which has ferried slaves, migrants, travelers, and fugitives, but also has served as its graveyard for them. Cuyson re-figures this nature of the ocean by also mourning for them through Untitled Fictional Feelings #44, where we see the twigs made of resin grow into a skeletal body lying on yellow foam, showing how the twigs, wood, and other objects we see afloat on the ocean have served as parts of a living body, whether a tree, a human body, and other life forms. However, when the physical body loses its ability to live, we are all reduced into such earth matter, just like Cuyson’s work where we end up looking extinct, residual, and, at the same time, skeletal. 

Yet the death animated by this work also shows how life can also fluidly disappear, and water becomes the aqueous graveyard as people cross into another world, paving the way for the world’s migration adventure, and at the same time, the birth and death of nations. The sea people, in this way, are the very people who enable the possibilities for our contemporary communities to transition from beginning to end, life and death. 

Cuyson’s exhibition, as a result, is an invitation to return to our water past, especially as the world diminishes into a decaying skeletal presence by persisting with the imaginaries of landlocked worlds. In the end, Taong Dagat is a dream of achieving a blue humanity whose ontology crosses the temporal lines of history, fluidly traveling between land and sea, and bearing an expanded kinship within the fluid rainbow of the gender spectrum, and showing that the path for us to collectively become people is to allow ourselves to spread like the sea, living in the world as if it has been peopled by the sea. 

Jose Mari Cuartero is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

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By turning the gallery space into a war room of Murillo maps, drawings, Brandt line neon light, and cubist characterization of archival images, Garcellano’s artwork stoically breathes into the atmosphere of geopolitical warfare of contemporary postcolonial Philippines, in which the grayscale color palette converts this exhibition into a military ensemble, acknowledging how it is geopolitically positioned. Unfortunately, the aesthetic freedom remains in the grip of the military cartography and the imperial warfare that counts and defines the acceptable image of one’s imaginable national territory. 

Under the weight of such ideological thinking of ruling sovereignties, our regional situation has ushered Garcellano into a direction where she imagines the folk as faceless, disfigured by the cubist aesthetics, which makes her drawings not only a way to wash away and efface our obsession with the figure or image. Instead, as the faces of the people appear empty, she dares to seize the nerve center of the tensed and quivering sensations of the shatter zones of these territorial disputes in which nation-states poorly perform, and harrowingly lead her to fragments and rubble that figure in and people farmlands, factories and villages being crippled and dwarfed into what Neferti Tadiar calls remaindered life. 

Surviving despair

Garcellano’s drawing, as a result, becomes a process of surviving the seemingly lengthening lines of despair, diminished by the totalizing regimes of oppression, forcing us to neglect or dismiss particularity, nuances, and distinctions, making us all witnesses of a monochromatic grayscale world of pessimism.

The idea of grayscale pessimism comes from the color of the grief that Garcellano performs, evokes and traces in this exhibition. This begins by allowing the specter of art history to haunt us once again. The drawings allude to Francisco Goya whose spectral presence figures in the work  After Goya’s The Junta of the Philippines (La Junta de Filipinas) 1815, drawn with graphite pencil on paper, which Garcellano turns the full oil on canvas, such as the royal red interior linings and margins, the full-color display of the restless crowd in the annual meeting of the Royal Company of the Philippines, along with the surprising presence of King Ferdinand VII at the center, into a color composition where all recede into a monochromatic depiction. By having this tonal register, the junta warps into a cartographic sketch of a seeming court hearing, deepening further the historical experience of Goya as someone whose political optimism was crushed by disappointment as the liberal politics of enlightenment dawned on him and, at the same time, the promise of salvation from the Spanish empire finally exposed its naked lies. Through this drawing, the trick of light of enlightenment appears merely into a haze of walls, charcoal black interiors, and corroding figures of people. 

Leaning into that history, Garcellano presses further valence of the emotional substance of pessimism that can be inhered from even archival works which many believed to be promising in the fields of arts, literary studies, and history. Yet, unfortunately, despite how archives open the wealth of the past, she refuses to take part in such false triumph for the same antique appearance of the photographs would only lead us back to the same social classes, racial subjectivity, and ethnic minoritarianism whose suffering collectively continues. 

In the work Filipinos Labeled as Indios, Garcellano translates an archival photo from American imperialist photography by subduing and ashening the faces of the children, allowing them to be given the chance to change their agency and preventing their photographic visibility and presence from being captured into traces and fading away. As Vicente Rafael shows the power of the native agency in their ability to recognize how, despite being colonial subjects, they look back, repel the camera, and “evade the colonial and national ways of seeing,” such a political perspective allows us also to appreciate Garcellano’s intervention as a form of turning the gaze into a process of disfiguring and withdrawing the same subjects from the colonial appropriation and utility of photography and the archive at large. 

Sexual division of labor

By harnessing the intractable nature and the capability of the people who populate this curatorial exhibition, Garcellano grants a fugitive characterization of them that deepens the blur of the faces as they all collectively figure in a visual body composition informed by the logic of the sexual division of labor. Looking at the drawing 19th Century Women Workers of the Tobacco Monopoly, a work based on a photograph from the archival photos in Ed de Jesus’ history of the tobacco monopoly in the Philippines, we get to see the collective nature of such labor production with a man standing on the left, behaving as an overlord, a stereotype of gender hierarchy. The work 20th Century Moro Boys in the Carpentry Shop, from a photo that alludes to the colonial process of labor servitude such as the Cabo system, shows the scaffoldings of the factory blackening, amplifying the role of contrasts. 

In the juxtaposition of these two works, the sexual division of labor also unravels in the form of an aesthetic display of contrasts, illustrating the seeming permanence of the antinomy of gender and class suffering, and their mark-making in the same spaces where they are forced to be smudged, blurred, and at large, socially displaced, fighting against the effacement of the truth of their desires—a rightful place in our society, a recognition in the share of our country’s wealth, and the value of the very labor that allows this nation to survive. 

The artistic gift of Garcellano, in this case, seizes the inextricable link among the people and how the same link exteriorizes the intersectionality of things despite the persistence of contrasts and divides among color, race, gender and class. All of them are intimately tied especially with the gradation from black to white drawing the range of the grayscale color pessimism that shares an expansive kinship with the critiques of Afro-pessimism whose affect listens to the painful truth of our world history, which Saidiya Hartman articulates as structured by using non-black as the point of departure to imagine freedom. 

Garcellano languishes in this problem by drawing a parallel experience in which our version has also evolved into a chronotope of our national history, appearing in the form of statecraft’s anti-Filipino political unconscious. She displays such tragedy in her neon-light work, The Brandt Line (1970 to 1980 version), which is the very line that divides the world between the global north and global south, illuminating in its curves, wrinkles and folds, providing a luminous presence to fully appreciate the drawings surrounding it and, at the same time, the installation The Things Before Us, where our claims to sovereign rights are weighed down by the dark painted stones, appearing like debris, along with the digital map of Pogo hubs, military training camps, and economic zones across the country, the West Philippine Sea, and our Murillo map, figuring as it is superimposed, a display of counter-mappings. 

Solidarity

With the dissimulation of empires of what can be considered as the people’s map, this exhibition of Garcellano is also an expression of solidarity with other nations whose maps are erased day by day, from Palestine to Ukraine. She allows her anger, protestations, and discontent to trace into the works, and make us follow through. Her hands are leading us to draw and trace further from and through our suffering, anger, and, in her case, pessimism as she confronts a history that Carmita Eliza de Jesus Icasiano calls “cyclical movements.” It’s a history where she sees how Garcellano’s understanding situates us in a truth where we seem to revert to our subjugated past, and the hope she wants us to disentangle from has never been premised on naïve optimism. 

Instead, Garcellano performs the autobiographical drawing of our country, without the rose-colored spectacles of liberalism, and bourgeois nationalism. She draws for us to immerse further in the depths of the grayscale color of our past and present, in the pains that colonial history may repeat once again, and in the fact that we may lose everything that we have, even our current country to which we dearly pledge our freedom and belonging—optimism of the hand, pessimism of the heart.

Jose Mari Cuartero is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

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But even before I came face to face with Still’s large-scale (from floor to ceiling) works at the museum that carries his name at 1250 Bannock Street, a short walk from the bigger neighbor, the Denver Art Museum, Ledesma regaled me with stories of how Still had the courage of his convictions. He kept most of his works and refused to sell to a hungry art market.

Not that he was conscious of his greatness. He just felt that, and this was stipulated in his will, “the paintings must be kept and exhibited in a space that was exclusively dedicated to the collection,” Ledesma said.

Like any other kid

Who is Clyfford Still and why is he so deserving of a museum that Ledesma calls one of the city’s “best-kept secrets,” but most deserving of becoming a more popular “pilgrimage site” for art enthusiasts and just anybody infatuated with colors?

In the book “Colorfully Courageous: Clyfford Still” by Jason Gruhl, the artist was said to have grown up like any other kid who “played, went to school, read books…and got in trouble. He loved baseball, Beethoven, piano and poetry, but of all the things he loved, painting was his favorite.”

Painting was frowned upon by the father who expected the son to help in the farm “and to take life more seriously.” But the father gifted him with his first tubes of oil paint and canvas, anyway.

The young Still visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City right before the Great Depression. But he emerged from the experience disappointed. Gruhl wrote, “The paintings were beautiful, but they didn’t feel right to him. He wanted to see how the artists felt on the inside. He wanted art to say more.”

Furthermore, “fear, poverty, and sadness made it hard for people to hold their heads up and stand tall…and this upset Clyfford deeply,” Gruhl continued. This was when Still began to paint not only what he saw but, most of all, what he also felt. This required him to travel across miles to observe landscapes, people and faces. At the museum, one views early works all in the representative vein. Memories of Filipino social realists like Pablo Baens Santos and Antipas Delotavo come to mind.

Soon, Gruhl wrote, Still no longer needed familiar subjects. Instead, he “was exploring all kinds of thoughts, feelings, and experiences. He was no longer bound by the edge of a frame, the bristles of a paintbrush.” Still painted using the impasto technique and wielded palette knives, not brushes. Thus, there is almost a three-dimensionality to his brushstrokes that are invitingly tactile in appeal.

He made his living by teaching at art schools so he was fairly relieved of the pressure to sell works. Besides, he didn’t want to sell—he was convinced that it was better to view an artist’s body of works by seeing them side by side and figuring out their interconnections.

3,125-piece collection

And so when he died in 1980, his widow Patricia was left with about 3,125 pieces which represented 93 percent of Still’s works in his lifetime. Apart from that are his archives—journals, drawing notebooks, correspondence, etc.

Ledesma told me that then Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper promised the widow that the collection “would be given all the support it deserved by the city and that it would be considered a premier and unique destination where museums in the USA were concerned.” What clinched the decision, as Ledesma liked to add as a juicy aside, was the mayor telling her that if she donated the estate to a city like New York or even Washington D.C., it would just be another museum among many.

To Ledesma, who has lived in Colorado for 25 years and seen the museum open in 2011, the works of Still “allow for my active participation in finding their measure in my life. As such, the process is always dynamic, always present, always alive.” 

He brings visitors to the museum “because of the singularity of the experience that I hope they will take from the visit and the unique perspective that the museum offers in terms of an architecture designed specifically to house the entire life’s work of Clyfford Still,” he said. “The thought and design process is nothing short of spectacular. The collection is also a premier example of America’s contribution to the world of Abstract Expressionism.” 

The first time Ledesma entered the museum, which covers 28,500 square feet, he could only call on a foreign word to describe what he felt. He said, “The French have a word for it: Bouleversè.” In short, he was shaken to his core.

Did he ever imagine doing a theater piece with a Still painting in the background? “Interesting, but no,” Ledesma said. “I can, however, imagine Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’ designed with one of Still’s canvases as a starting point.”

Read more: Artist researching: Experience curves in Taiwan and Cambodia

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As a tribute to the propagandist’s heroism, Ilonggo visual artists Kristoffer Brasileno, JJ Macabanti and Bryan Caoyonan repainted the mural of Lopez Jaena on Muelle Loney Street or Iloilo River wharf. 

Born in Jaro, Iloilo, in 1856, the patriot was known for his extraordinary oratory skills and sharp wit. He was also a brilliant writer and journalist, his contributions to the propaganda movement being pivotal for the revolutionary cause in awakening national consciousness and inspiring the fight against Spanish colonization.

In 1888, Lopez Jaena founded and became editor of “La Solidaridad,” a newspaper that became the voice of Filipinos aspiring for freedom and reform. Writing with satire and humor as literary tools, he criticized the Spanish regime, rallied his countrymen to embrace independence and illuminated the revolutionary path toward freedom.

The mural project, aside from being a preservation activity, was also part of the city government’s sustained support for public art and the creative expression of its artists, the makeover visible in now colorful flyovers, bridges and streets. 

Public art plays a crucial role in keeping history alive and relevant. Thus, Lopez Jaena’s mural serves as a visual storytelling medium that connects past heroism with present-day pride and inspires future generations. 

Lopez Jaena’s legacy remains deeply relevant, inspiring new generations and receiving the honor it deserves through public art initiatives in Iloilo City.

His writings and speeches continue to inspire a sense of patriotism and a commitment to the ideals of liberty and equality. 

Through the mural’s vibrant strokes, we honor his legacy and pass it on to inspire future generations.

Read more: Artist paints tribute to heroes in time for Independence Day

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The exhibition welcomes us with a diptych, The Beginning of a Journey, mixed media on carton board on paper in which the field of vision animates a color interaction of overlapping patches appearing like a collage, shifting between the top or side view perspectives. With such possibilities, the work also dares to achieve various figural shapes of arcades, mounds, geographical hill terrains, and, at the same time, a body that may be lying on the ground, surrounded by greenery smothered by a fading light blue at the center. The figural body appears as if cradled by the ground with nature’s expanse as the body’s background. 

This work captures our relationship with nature beyond the frame of landscapes; it is a haptic experience in which we become sheltered by the ground, making the natural environment, apart from being an economic resource, a dwelling place for rest, recovery, and relaxation.  

Cosmic energy

With the figural body stretched on the ground, the imagination that dwells in such a work provides the cue for the curation to lead us to a documentary film commissioned to JR Dalisay on Riccelli’s art production. In this work, we see from Riccelli’s filmic presence someone who seems to have found a cradle in her humble hut in the heart of Siquijor’s forest, cinematically unraveling her artistic instincts with the paint from the tube sliding through the breadth of the canvases, and looking enthralled by the luminous skies framed by her veranda. 

Moving in such a curatorial arrangement, we can press the pulse throbbing across the paintings, the documentary film, and the biographical account of her current artistic practice. With such triangulation, the chaos that conceptually frames this exhibition may also lead us to imagine the cosmic energy of the current place where she allows her artistic habitation to nestle, grow, and meld.

Perhaps, the energy of the cosmic world Riccelli basks in would be at once abstract and concrete as her vision of chaos materializes through the collectivity that she admires, such as the people. This formation of people plays a great interest for the artist; they take center stage in an acrylic on canvas board, People, where the presence of human bodies signifies like waves of flames, conflagrating in the foreground yet tempered by a clear skyline with the curves, crests, and mounds that expose its deep-seated earthly tones, dark ridges, and layers of soil formation, which serve as the bedrock supporting the intense depiction of human movement. We get to see that the collective of people would not be autonomous, and in a state of exceptionalism, but always framed and tempered by the energy embodied by nature. 

It is an observation that may be also reinforced in works like The Doubt and The Talk. People across these works turn the ecology as the force field that ushers naturally the movement of the human flow towards the vanishing point of destiny, and in their respective sojourns, human bodies morph into brushstrokes of light, energy, and intensity, making such a collective scale not only a mere body count but also the bearers of light. 

Is there magic?

However, while light may also be viewed as the source of energy—and in the case of visual art, painting is known to function as a manipulation of light—how does light also serve as the source of energy in the cosmic world of Siquijor, especially within the practice of art production? Does light become relevant in an artist’s imagination and creativity? Perhaps, for an artist working in an island known to be the dwelling place of enchantment and poverty, is there magic? How does light also function and appear in the realm of abstract art for an artist like Riccelli, who has moved from Italy, to the African continent, and then finally to the Philippines, in Dumaguete and Siquijor, which are places known to have experienced the heat of the sun as the primary source of light? How do these places perhaps inform her artworks and our understanding of the genre where she becomes visible, especially that she could have been influenced by places known to have relied on the energy of their respective vast workforces? 

The easiest answer would be, through the work Rising from the Gourge, the energy would always be the wave and lugubrious nature of light that this work captures, especially through a bodily figure, which explodes and undulates into ripples, splashes, and drippings, appearing divine. This bodily figure is situated on top of layers that morph into planks, and rectangular patterns that, while being intermittently disrupted by the seeming oscillating nature of energy, are eventually released in the form of ripples and light waves. 

Yet with the explosion from the depths of the “gourge,” such light is precisely released from itself for it has the propensity to be repressive and, in the long run, oppressive to itself, instead of waiting for such body to implode in its interior world—a kind of insight that percolates in Riccelli’s memories, whether from her travels, her worldview, and personal insights into the quotidian nature of life. Perhaps, in releasing such light from the containment enabled by the gourge, as we draw from Alice Barnaby, it can also be interpreted as Riccelli’s “practice of illumination” in a world dominated by harrowing darkness, which dawns on us “upon the surface of ourselves and all that we encounter.”  

Light and darkness

Yet, of course, Riccelli never pontificates of herself as an artist and a migrant to our part of the world. She brims with light as she looks at the order of things with a great sense of humility. Through The Horizon is Far, an acrylic on canvas that turns the distance of the road measured by the temporality of a sunset, extending itself on the ground while being captured from the frame of a cavernous arch, the perspective eventually becoming densely layered by intersecting lines that dramatize terrains, slopes, and heights. 

The appearance of dusk in this work characterizes, on the one hand, a dusty, empty, and perhaps arid landscape. On the other hand, its emptiness allows us to see the temporal duration of the day as the sun sets, illuminating the kinship of light with darkness, whether as contrasts or oppositions. In this work, the horizon that we normally feel enthralled with as landscape art also signifies the index that scales our ambitions to own and make the world; emphasizing its expansiveness may also be the distance we fantasize to traverse. Unfortunately, precisely because it is a fantasy, the distance illuminated by the sunset from the cave viewpoint measures our human ability to inhabit the world, especially with the configurations and geographic conditions of the land, including the time afforded by the turning of the day. 

By recognizing our inherent limits, The Soul Tree makes us imagine the inherent life, power, and energy of nature. This work refuses to illustrate the natural environment from a touristic gaze; instead, it summons its inherent folkloric charge through the spectral white strokes splayed across the canvas, while being interrupted by the horizontal file of soft, tender lineaments. With the lines dispersed across the surface, the dense dark background is superimposed on and canopied by luminous green foliage-looking patches where, in some pockets, the figural images of a leaf, a body, and a folkloric figure frame the white specter branching out from the center. 

The light, in this case, also comes with the form, an insight drawn from Riccelli, which allows her to approach her work, the subjects, and. perhaps, the dynamics of memories, experiences, evolving styles, and places she visited. This point leads us to appreciate her act of abstracting the world as a virtue of making what she describes as “overlapping realities” into something palpable, and, perhaps, as our unrealized second nature. 

‘Maelstrom’

As we are folded into the world of nature, it can also mean a form of inhabiting an ontology in which we live with the crisis of modern man that Riccelli’s work, The Magicians and the Sun, illustrates as a critique of modernity. We can recognize the sunlight gushing from the center down to the borders of the canvas, while also morphing into seemingly hard and solid frames, which she also describes as metals being melted by the heat, along with the interruptions from heavy dark brushstrokes, arches, and curves. The dynamics of the details of the work foreground the splintering of a vast rouge-like surface, making everything tattered by the brightness that seems to blast from the center. 

Seeing the ruptures in Riccelli’s abstraction, one may construe this work as also a form of wrestling with a lifeworld in which what prevails is what Marshall Berman calls the “maelstrom of modern life” that evolves and insists to be the nature of the modern world. 

Apparently, such disorder is also where the solid foundations, pillars, and infrastructures of the modern world are exposed by Berman as melting in our atmosphere until they waft away. With this nature of the matter in the world conjured by Riccelli, Melting Together is a work that puts to the fore a yellow sunlight yoked by two other primary colors, red and blue, which both appear as drippings, a net of strokes, occupying either angle of the frame, laying out a stretch of gradation, making the edge of the frame deepest in color, but also receding as these angles extend until they fade into one another. 

The work captures a whirlpool that illuminates a melting process that does not lead to a dissolution or a tragic meltdown. Instead, the melting process is an abstraction of personhood that animates the vitality within a chaotic experience where energy is displayed but, at the same time, true to its nature, is an “abstract thing,” as Richard Feynman describes it. The melting that this painting visualizes is also the veracity of the state of being of energy whenever one moves and translates oneself into a potential state of matter. 

‘Fever dream’

Perhaps, the pulse of our present state may be felt by the curator of Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines, Diliman: Tessa Maria Guazon, who currently depicts the contemporary world in a “fever dream” as exemplified in the form of burning forests, plagues, etc. The fever in such a dream also invites us to recognize how we are embodying the planet’s burning heat that may only lead us to a collective melting. In a sense, the transition from solid to liquid may be deemed as a cultural translation of all the concreteness in the world into something liquified and abstract, and this also proves what Cymene Howe and others believe the sun’s “influence and its interference, its effects in the moment and over time, extended,” unraveling our present as in a state of “solarity.” 

Yet through how the light from above radiates upon us, Howe and other scholars have recognized that “the sun [appears] in everyone, everything,” and through this continuum of light, we get to receive the light from talent, imagination, creativity and, certainly, the pains, sufferings, and challenges of Riccelli. 

We get to share with her the energy, and specifically, as she describes it, the “power” of nature which is lighted upon by the sun burning brightly in Siquijor. Through the pleasure we derive from her exhibition, we melt with Riccelli and all the colors that wash away the emptiness of her canvas surfaces.

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A group show at Bunso Gallery organized by Bacolod-based artists’ Mind Salad Collective, titled “When Earth, Heaven, and Hell Collide” (Jan. 13-Feb. 3, 2024), explores and wrestles with the triadic relationships of heaven, hell, and earth through the philosophical compass of collision. 

In the curatorial wall text, Guenivere Decena defines collision as a form of “condens[ing] the incompatibilities and impenetrabilities of what these realms represent in cognitive neurology, social constructs, and cultural ecologies.” With such entanglement of the three despite their differences and frictions, we can also imagine heaven, hell, and earth as not severely isolated paradigms from one another. All of them, in fact, make sense in a state of collision. The emotions awakened by such worlds, such as the feeling of pleasure in heaven, the pain caused by hell, and the humility enabled by the earth animate affects as our “intrapersonal ventures,” and, borrowing from Decena, collide against perhaps the state of things. 

Bereft of life forms

The collision may unfold interestingly by welcoming us in the gallery to a vast landscape, an oil painting on treated wood titled Genesis, by Dennis Occeña. In this painting, the landscape bleeds into a blood-red hue that gets illuminated by an overcast horizon bereft of flora and fauna. Despite the emptiness of the terrain, the painting’s proportions are partitioned by rock formations where a plateau figures and protrudes at the center, while the spires frame it from either side. The absence of life forms at the heart of this work allows us to be sensitive to its atmosphere in which the landscape gets smothered by mist and wind. 

With this landscape called “Genesis,” we cannot also help but invoke the painting’s attempt to allude to the Biblical narrative of the book of Genesis and the Christian mythology behind our world’s creation. The specter of the Christian narrative that hounds the work also conjures a juxtaposition between the Biblical narrative and the image, and in their meeting point, we cannot help but imagine the possibility of the making of the story of creation as the nativity of the very story of destruction. By being constitutive of one another, the bareness of the rouge landscape incites us to imagine that our visual imagination of hell is also the frame from which we visualize the heavens. With the rock formation at the center of this landscape painting, it can be also the ground on which imaginations of a hellish world, or a promising paradise can be made and built.

Despite the seeming emptiness of such a vast landscape of the creation story, certainly, the development of the plotline of the planet’s beginning will always be enabled by characters and the human body. Karl Arnaiz’s charcoal on acid-free paper and canvas explores the human body to one’s maximal reach: the nakedness, bruised and scarred skin, the disablement of one’s physical characteristics, the folds, curves, and plumpness of one’s size, and the potential eros when the skin comes in contact with another. 

Source of light

With the breadth of his imagination of the body, in Shadow, Arnaiz foregrounds two women who appear like mirror images, and at the same time, the work makes the surface of their skin the source of light. Since light emanates from the women’s bodies, an image illuminated by charcoal, their bodies also morph into a space that provides volume, depth, and shape for darkness, light, and even the world they inhabit. This work is in visual dialogue with Between the Realms of What’s Known and Unknown where the two bodies are united by an embrace and care yet also these subjects mirror one another’s physical disability. While in Scream of Solitude, an individual whose plus-size body comes to the fore as one sits on top of a rock, this subject figures at the center by revealing one’s bruises and lacerations. Through the use of the play and contrasts of black and white, and the gradations in between, the works elucidate the shadow work inherent in the paradigms as the bodies envision and even inhabit their versions of heaven, hell, and earth. 

To a certain extent, these categories, as much as they circumscribe our moral judgments, also trace the shades of our moral dispositions, bodily feelings, and personal imperfections.

Decomposition 

In as much as we contend with the dispositions as if we are standing on quicksand, we still draw lines to figure further ourselves and our ways into the collisions. Lines have served as the means for Jayvee Necessario in his use of pen, ink, charcoal, and graphite to foreground bodily entrails by also highlighting the inherent cubist character of the human body. In his series titled Decomposing Gods, the bodies trace and sharpen, through graphite on acid-free paper, often hidden entrails, skeletal frames, and muscles, which make the body, specifically of the gods, lose its ideal image, and reveal the decomposition, not by only in a condition of antagonism or conflict with a non-god entity. Instead, the body decomposes by virtue of strain, tension, and effort. As such, if one desires to be a god, one must also muster bodily constraints. Perhaps the bodily constraints also bear a herculean effort that large-scale portraits such as Play It by Ear and The Abundance of Right and Wrong try to seize. 

In their respective artistic lifeworlds, through the accretion of details, textures, sketches, and shades, while also giving visibility to subjects, such as a quasi-soldier diminishing into a skeletal subject, or two seated subjects who stage moral trouble between right and wrong, the line in these works also show how bodies are not finite, but built and shaped through the shades of one’s dimension. This physical disposition may be visually captured through the layers and shades of one’s labor servitude, the stress patterns that one endures in the process of using one’s body, and the toil that the muscle archives through its sinews and curves. Perhaps, these works also make us realize how we rely visually on the bodily character as our index in navigating our everyday moral economy. 

Temporality

However, Mikiboy Pama also expands the position of these works within the constellation of a global economy of signs, which highlights, in our attempts to think about heaven, hell, and earth, a form of evaluating the temporal nature of the times.

Pama intervenes in the quintessential Bosch’s world by confronting the pillars of our Catholic moral imagination and, at the same time, deploying an intermedial approach to painting, bringing together oil, aerosol, enamel, archival pen, image transfer, polymer glue, textured paint and collage on canvas. In Nativitas, Pama defamiliarizes the sacred image of Mary’s body as dismembered across her head, feet, and womb, which the latter brings to the fore its animalistic propensity. The womb in its skeletal frame bears the egg while being framed by Adam and Eve, and the animals of the wild, which discharges the idyllic fantasy of Mary’s immaculate conception. Instead, Pama acknowledges the precarity of Mary’s predicament, and by visualizing the danger and difficulty of Mary’s childbearing, the traumatic real behind the Christ narrative is further exposed. With this perspective, Confusia Existentia alludes to the Biblical narrative of the lamb of God where he whacks it open for us, putting to the fore the veracity of the human-animal relation behind the veil of Christian morality. 

Such visceral quality of Pama’s artistic technique leads us to Aeternum Remeo where it inscribes the text “Vaya Con Dios” along with the image transfer of the galleon boat at the center, while being framed by two aging figures. The work evokes the maritime journey as a form of aging, and thus, our age becomes a temporal period of sailing into the wilderness of the world’s civilization—whether in the past, present, or future—in which most of us wish to finally dock at the port where paradise can be found. 

However, from the rouge swath of rock landscape to the maritime world of the wilds of civilization, is paradise merely, to borrow from Jacques Derrida, a future to come? After all, the collision of heaven, earth, and hell turns these works into attempts to anchor oneself in the broader colliding scapes of happiness. Drawing from Jerry Walls, a Calvinist philosopher, hell will always be determined by heaven, and to signify hell would always underpin the “desire for happiness,” which most of us believe that heaven guarantees. Yet as the artists turn the gallery space into a state of collision, then the wall paintings draw the lines from which the landscapes of happiness begin to become porous, drift away, and turn the sites of what is supposed to give us happiness as shatter zones. 

These painters, in the end, may be deemed to reconstruct the consequences and aftershocks of collision, trying to redeem the world in the aftermath of a clash, disruption, and disorder. Yet as they unravel their works with such sizeable scales, we may also ask: Is their practice also about trying to achieve the elusive happiness?  Why continue to persist with such a harrowing imagination of the world when such a world allows us to have a peek of hell while on Earth? Or do these works finally settle the problem of heaven and make us finally come to terms that these works by Bacolod artists have finally painted what we need to accept as our paradise?

Read more: Artist researching: Experience curves in Taiwan and Cambodia

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Curated by Jose “Bogie” Tence Ruiz, himself a well-known social realist and Delotavo’s longtime friend, “Iloilo Variants” was launched as a two-tiered art event, with a vernissage on July 27 that unveiled the oil-on-canvas pieces (the oldest dated 2014 and the most recent 2022), and a curator’s talk on July 29 at The Box of the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art (Ilomoca). 

Ruiz walked the audience through Delotavo’s body of work, from his humble beginnings in 1971, when he left Iloilo after a year of studies at the University of San Agustin to pursue a course in fine arts at the Philippine Women’s University in Manila.

“Bogie’s talk brought nostalgia, especially since I’m not the type to reminisce about my works,” declared Delotavo, 69. “It brought back a lot of memories as the wide-screen projection of some of my works enabled me to see the details that have escaped my mind already. It made me realize that my work is not bad at all.” 

The show runs until Sept. 17 at the Ilomoca’s ground-floor Hulot Gallery.

‘Awkward, unwilling neighbors’

In his talk, Ruiz depicted the collection as Delotavo’s “will to salient juxtaposition.”

Ruiz said the impact of Delotavo’s “recent works and longtime métier lies in his juxtaposition of worlds that are, in real terms, mutually exclusive yet impinge on each other like awkward, unwilling neighbors.”

According to the curator, juxtaposition is “an effective didactic method that contrasts, if not compares, two opposing sides, two facets of one existence that allow one side to enjoy pleasure, treasure, and luxe until it is sick from the abundance, while the other is starved and deprived to the point that it remains undernourished, unattended, and unwell, if not downright sick, this time of unmitigated destitution.”

“All our democratic, esthetic leanings clamor for this anomaly of inequity to be mediated, for charity to remedy if not to negotiate with greed, for selfishness to yield to altruism, but alas, as the insightful Indian American philosopher Aijaz Ahmad declared, the logic of capital is now too deeply entrenched in all of our societies,” said Ruiz.

“Delotavo’s juxtapositions have been threading these tainted waters for so, so long, hoping not to be exhausted, hoping not to succumb to drowning in their murky inertia, or lapse into convenient ornamentalism with just enough of a redolence of progressive rhetoric, however we construe that in 2023,” he said.

The works also highlight a persevering facet of Delotavo’s practice, the “shock-of-recognition portraiture,” which, said Ruiz, show a “recurrent decision to sample the tropes of overabundant material excesses that live not very far from the abject and often dispossessed and resigned everyman.”

Architectural landmarks

“Iloilo Variants” shows “recognizable architectural landmarks of Iloilo’s commercial history against which [Delotavo] situates or floats his disposed denizens,” Ruiz said.

“It is not a straightforward landscape,” he said, but “more of a historico-cultural layering, with an added genericized modernist horizon hovering as an inviting but uncertain future of these markers of Hispanic and neoclassical colonial occupation, architectural monarchs etched into the mental narrative of those who would call Iloilo their home or point of origin.”

The tone is set by Royal Street (38 x 59 inches), also known as Calle Real, the old downtown district of Iloilo City, which symbolizes the economic and political center. The area was declared a heritage site after undergoing restoration years ago.

Royal Street shows a string of edifices that made up the stretch: “a congress of the influential looming over men and women on asphalt or cement, not quite sure of where they are going, not quite a participant in the power that the locale exudes,” Ruiz said.

Other famous facades come into the compositions, like the often photographed Eusebio Villanueva Building, popularly known as the Washington International Hotel, shown in Kombustyon (48 x 36 inches); the Bahay Panlalawigan ng Iloilo or the Casa Real with the Arroyo Fountain in front of it in the piece Variant VI (40 x 30 inches); and the Iloilo Central Market in Warriors (40 x 30 inches), a place that is close to Delotavo’s heart because his father, then a police officer, used to bring him to the police station on the second floor of the structure.

One piece that solicits much attention is Domination (48 x 36 inches), which shows the form of the Lizares Mansion (now Angelicum School) with a new ironwork arch above it—“harking to the stockade entrance of the Holocaust Auschwitz Camp, with an English translation of the sardonic phrase Arbeit macht frei (Work sets you free),” said Ruiz.

“Delotavo does not necessarily reject the progress and beauty that these art deco and neoclassical landmarks have brought to his home province,” declared Ruiz. “He does glaringly remark, though, that the mechanisms and social systems needed to distribute these gifts of the colonizers must have fallen short and are not up to speed, to the point that by juxtaposing their grandeur with the unflinching and longstanding plainness of the citizens that he sets beside them, he creates works that manifest—nay enunciate—the ironic inequity.”

Ruiz summed it up thus: “This may lie at the heart of this brand of social realism; this may lie at the core of an art that celebrates even while it observes and critiques with a tinge of deep discomfort, … much like one peering at the banquet from an unattainable distance while placating a ravenous stomach, a famished gut, and even a hungrier soul.”

Artistic sensibilities 

Delotavo is the youngest of nine siblings. The family lived in the now-populous Barangay Rizal-Estanzuela, with the Iloilo fishing port and terminal market close by.

He developed an eye for art as early as when he was eight years old, among family members who were brilliant at drawing and making illustrations. 

“Most of us know how to draw, and my siblings were always drawing during their free time,” he said.

Delotavo traced the instances that shaped his artistic sensibilities, and the process was like putting pieces of a puzzle together to complete a picture—encounters at home, in the community, and then in the city where he grew up.

He recalled watching everyday people use their creative prowess as a means of livelihood, such as a neighbor named Moros who did illustrations for students and teachers and lettering for diplomas, painted watercolor portraits, and rendered images on materials like pitogo and wood that were made into keychains.

He and his friend and neighbor, Papo de Asis, were “habitues” of Moros’ shanty. “Our close encounters with him, watching him work over something, probably triggered our artistic sensibilities,” Delotavo said.

In 1976, De Asis and Delotavo, together with now-illustrious names in the Philippine social realist movement—Pablo “Adi” Baen Santos, Neil Doloricon, Renato Habulan, Albert Jimenez, Al Manrique, Orlando Castillo, Jose Cuaresma, Edgar Talusan Fernandez, Charles Funk, and Bogie Ruiz, among others—founded the art collective Kaisahan (Solidarity). 

“Unlike today, Iloilo City did not have an art scene to speak of in the early 1970s,” noted Delotavo. He learned from what was available, marveling at a large movie billboard done for May Theater by a person named “Alfutin,” whose signature was emblazoned at the bottom as though the work were a public art mural, as well as the sculptural pieces of Marañon, which he frequently viewed at the Hoskyn Compound.

But one encounter that persists in his memory is a life-size concrete sculpture of a woman embracing a tomb at the Tanza Public Cemetery. The sculpture gave him a hair-raising experience every time he took the cemetery route as a shortcut to get to his friend’s house.

Some may find those early encounters as informal, even low, art, but Delotavo said they contributed to his learning and enriched his appreciation of art talent, which paved the way for him to become one of the Philippines’ multi-awarded watercolorists and portraitists. 

Pondering on art and its role in society, Delotavo said: “Only economically successful and progressive societies in the world recognize art and culture as vitally important for the growth of their country and people.”

He said Ilonggo artists today are “lucky to have a supportive city government and like-minded collectors and people who are responsible for Iloilo City’s cultural renaissance.”

“As an artist, I believe that there is no high art or low art,” Delotavo said. “If art touches or moves you, it’s the best art in the world.”

The post Antipas Delotavo’s juxtaposition of worlds appeared first on CoverStory.

Tyrone’s work, Family Tree (5 x 6 feet, inlay on wood), is an ode. “The importance of the family is the main message that my entry intends to convey to viewers. It is my effort to highlight the significance of the family to humanity, and to honor the hardships and struggles of our family,” he says. 

Each character in Family Tree is “inlaid in macabre appearance to embrace the emotional epitome of every member of the family, with the parents at the center serving as the heart and mind and the source of the family’s wisdom and empowerment,” says Tyrone, 32. “The overall composition imparts a moral message that a unified family starts at home.” 

Jun’s piece, Light Lines (48 x 60 inches, engraved automotive on canvas), shows the artist’s break from conventional forms of artmaking, whether in terms of materials, medium, process, or execution. “My work is aimed at pushing the boundaries of materiality and process in artmaking, and I attained this in Light Lines,” he says. 

He employed a combination of approaches to come up with the artwork. He used a body filler, an automotive material, as a medium through multiple layering, then made an engraving using wood sculpturing tools to create textures and images, and completed the piece by burning some areas to generate a rusty shadow effect and reveal the hues of sepia.

The process of engraving and scorching automotive material creates a “light line,” says Jun, 27. The message is that there is beauty and hope beneath the rustic and seemingly ugly surface—a metaphor for hope emerging despite life’s struggles.

Filipino critic, curator and art professor Patrick Flores describes Tyrone’s Family Tree as “an encompassing ecology.” Adds Flores: “Meticulous, attentive, and dedicated to the liveliness of ornament, the scene of the family assumes the form of organisms and their vital parts, perhaps an allusion to the robust flora that make wood, art, and [the] world possible.”

Consequently, “the scene of everyday life that is represented is finally animated by the task of sensitive, diligent making,” Flores says of Jun’s Light Lines. “Exploring the options afforded by the automotive material of the body filler, the artist builds up not only texture but also image.”

The siblings’ artworks are part of the Philippine Art Awards 2023 exhibition of winning pieces at the Yuchengco Museum (RCBC Plaza, Makati), on view until July 30.

Luminaries

Tyrone Dave Espinosa and Jun Orland Espinosa have been luminaries in the Iloilo contemporary art scene for more than a decade. Their wood sculptures are among the most sought-after works in every art exhibit that they participate in.

They are diligent artists who continuously study and experiment to improve their artmaking, as attested to by the awards that they have received through the years. Tyrone gained a special citation for his thought-provoking Nakakabinging Katahimikan or Deafening Silence (wood, 25 x 19 x 12 inches) at the Metrobank Art Design Excellence Award 2021. Jun’s Underneath (wood, 58 x 53 x 58cm x 18kg) merited a special citation in sculpture at the Metrobank Art Design Excellence Award 2022. He was a grand prize winner at the EVM International Arts Awards in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Philippine Art Awards in 2018.

The brothers seem predestined to become brilliant artists by their genetic code. They belong to a family of carpenters, furniture makers and wood carvers. Their craftsmanship in ornamental wood sculpture was their doorway to contemporary art, and their renditions on wood are considered surreal expressionist art.

Jun started as an ornamental wood sculptor at 13, “or even younger,” he says, “through the actual mentorship of our father and uncles, doing wood carvings mostly on furniture, like chairs, tables, cabinets and beds.” 

“Our free time as youngsters was spent in the shop in Bacolod City, where we grew up,” he recalls. “During vacations, we would visit our uncles and relatives in Iloilo and work in their shops.” 

These experiences honed the brothers’ skills and deepened their appreciation of wood for utilitarian purposes and its potential for art.

Family artisans

Says Tyrone: “The skills that we acquired from the artisans in our family served as the fundamentals of our artmaking. And this is demonstrated by the various techniques that we have applied to our art, like woodcut, engraving, and inlay.”

The intergenerational nature of the siblings’ development is manifested in not only their skills but also their understanding of the tools used. According to Jun, knowing the appropriate tool for a particular piece of wood was something handed over to them.

“The V-cut chisel,” says Tyrone, “is a precious and powerful tool, and this was passed on by our forefathers to our father, and then to us.” Some tools are bespoke and customized for their needs by blacksmiths, who likewise follow intergenerational arrangements and are close to the family. 

The brothers consider the tools an inheritance; their familiarity with the tools is shown in their ease in shaping pieces of wood into ornate carvings, jaw-dropping wood mosaics, and award-winning sculptures.

Their works highlight the uncommon and vanishing resource that is wood—and their overarching advocacy. “We try to convey that wood as a material requires respect, and elevating it into art pieces is our way of doing justice to it,” says Tyrone.

This is why the Espinosas ventured beyond ornamental wood sculpture and into contemporary art, making them and their relatives a rarity in the art world today.

Multisensory sculptures

The brothers’ artworks are the type that grab you at first sight and stay with you for a long time. This was demonstrated in their three-man show, Salvaged, in 2018, which they mounted with another decorated wood sculptor, their cousin Jeanroll Ejar.

Salvaged was described by the visiting journalist Thelma Sioson as “a searing commentary of the times—powerful yet not depressing, somewhat social and political yet not clichéd, whimsical, witty and fresh.” 

“Given such layers of expressions, the wood sculptures, in this writer’s eyes at least, come out beautiful, not trite,” she said.

Tyrone’s work is “individually powerful,” Sioson said. “They’re carved chains—entangled masses that are intriguing to the beholder simply because they show no beginning or end.”

Jun’s work, alternatively, are “sculptures of wood planks mounted on the walls [that], from afar, seem like random compositions of shapes and textures,” Sioson said. “Upon closer look, however, the viewer gets overwhelmed by what, in fact, they are: collages of heads or parts of faces evoking sounds. The viewer readily sees the screams, without hearing them.” 

The strong emotions and deep meaning that are effectively conveyed by the Espinosas’ works are rooted in their multisensory approach to shaping their art and handling wood with veneration, be it a found item like driftwood, salvaged wood from junkyards, or new lumber.

They examine every piece of wood to identify its peculiarity, recognize its genuine characteristics, and understand its origin and variety. They smell it, touch it, to feel its texture and age. This exploration is integral to their artmaking: “It reinforces our skills, craftsmanship, and experience—the foundations of our art,” says Tyrone.

Available material

The Espinosas follow a conscientious art process by prioritizing scraps.

“We make art from available material, even scraps from the shop,” says Tyrone. “We conceptualize our art not just from the physical beauty of the wood, but by examining it, then doing research on it, making art that is connected to the wood’s life.” 

Holding driftwood, for instance, the brothers do not cut it right away or make a carving through its natural contours. Rather, they work backwards to understand its subsistence, purpose, and function. They consider understanding the material a crucial step, for it integrates the natural dimension of the material into their art, extending life, if not giving new life, to the wood.

Their practice of converting neglected pieces of wood into sculptures is demonstrated in Jun’s Underneath, which came from salvaged roots that were stored in the shop for a long time. The artwork is a deliberation on life’s tragedies caused by failing health or illness and faith’s restorative ability to create hope. 

Studying the appropriate technique for available material is illustrated by Tyrone in his Family Tree: “I used inlay, a technique applied to old furniture, in which a pattern or an outline of an image is carved on the surface of the wood, and then another material of contrasting color is inserted.”

“The inlay is a 17th-century woodworking technique in Europe that made its way to the Philippines and was then used on antique tables, baul (wooden trunks), or chests of drawers,” Tyrone says. “But I innovated on its application for my art. I used resin because of its availability and durability instead of the traditional bones and pearls for inlay.”

The brothers’ experiments are an outcome of their continuous study and expansion of their sphere of learning beyond their architecture background through art residency programs. Tyrone completed the Linangan Amuyong Apprenticeship Program in 2022, and Jun was part of the Eskinita Gallery mentorship program in 2019. The programs broadened their knowledge and allowed them to understand the gamut of issues surrounding art operations and management.

Enduring subjects 

Family and faith are enduring subjects in the art of the Espinosas, revealing their strong spiritual life and close family ties. Their art personifies honesty and transparency, as well as courage to reveal their innermost dilemmas and aspirations.

This can be gleaned from Jun’s recent residency exhibit, Beyond Senses, at the Eskinita Art Farm in Tanauan, Batangas, and from Tyrone’s works that serve as a tribute to their parents—Indan (inlay on wood, 61.25 x 49.25 inches) and Medjong (inlay on engraved wood, 5 x 4 feet), on view at the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art and Museo Iloilo, respectively.

Declares Tyrone: “Our experience as wood sculptors has taught us that art is a powerful medium for public education, especially if artworks are created with the full understanding of the life, nature, function, and purpose of the materials that are used—like wood, in our case. We employ these values in our artmaking to give new life to wood, with the intention of using art to share meaning and empower viewers.” 

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