The inactive volcano that is Mount Banahaw functions in our Philippine social life in different ways: a natural fortress against tropical cyclones from the Pacific, the dwelling place of mystical, and a protected forest reserve. This mountain solidifies its enchanting presence in the heart of the Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with the exhibition Sa Kabilang-tabing ng Panahong Ito, featuring the artist from Quezon province, Mark Salvatus, and the poet curator, Carlos Quijon. 

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.