Who are the sea people? What does it mean for people to embody the vastness of the sea? What happens when the sea’s massiveness measures up with the collectivity of the people? 

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.