Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
Made an effort to attend Kevin Cornelia's clay hand-building workshop at the National Museum of the Philippines Dumaguete [ IG: @nmpdumaguete ] today, again between classes and other to-do's today, because we need to support local culture. Next time, I'll really participate instead of just document the event, and really get my hands [and feet!] dirty. We're at the tail-end of National Museums and Galleries Month this October! Have you visited your local museums and galleries yet?
I had to catch this between classes and other to-do's today, because we need to support local culture. This was postponed because of Typhoon Katrina, but here we are! Dumaguete clay artist Hemrod Duran currently doing a workshop on clay extraction at the National Museum of the Philippines Dumaguete [ IG: @nmpdumaguete ]! Tomorrow, also at 2 PM, a workshop on clay hand-building by Kevin Cornelia.
Currently watching a documentary on Charles and Ray Eames — artists and designers after my own heart. They believed that all art connects, and in their case, architecture and design, film and photography, and painting in particular. I love that they were mavericks. I love that they started their career with a failure [i.e., the famous Eames chair was notorious for starting out to be a literal award-winning failure of a chair — they could not find a way to manufacture it, until they actually did]. I love that they did film. My favorites are still Powers of Ten [1977] and Day of the Dead [1957] and Symmetry [1961], because these short films are so beyond what you would expect Eames to do.
12:51 PM |
A Grand Finale to the 2022 CCP Arts Academy
Have you ever had that feeling that you've done your best, and now it's up to the fates for that one last go to end up at least satisfactorily? We — the mentors for literature, dance, theatre, visual arts, music, and film — workshopped and workshopped and workshopped for five days straight, and now it came to this: a recital involving all the participants for the closing ceremony.
With barely half-a-day of rehearsals to iron out the kinks and to determine what needed to be done [choreography, choice of pieces, etc.], we were in it because everyone wanted it. In fact, we started the week thinking a final performance was going to be optional for each workshop. By Wednesday, all the mentors were keen to do at least something. By Thursday afternoon, we had some idea about what to do. By Friday morning, the rehearsals began. By Friday afternoon, the performances were on the slot.
AND IT WAS TREMENDOUS. It was like watching a concert of all the arts coming together in a spectacular and unexpected grand finale, with everybody doing their best to make everything work. You couldn't tell that most of the dances — sometimes paired with poets or with theatre artists — were improvised on the spot. It was just all seamless, certainly not without its flaws [a missing cue, a missing mic, etc.], but altogether fantastic. This is why in this video, as the last performers took a bow, we are all so generous with our applause, because we recognized that we just did something magical — and that all that hard work actually went to something tangible.
I think I echo my other co-mentors when I repeat what I said to myself at the end of the program: "Oh my God, they all actually learned something from us." We actually observed that our participants — 188 teachers from all over the Philippines — were hungry to learn, were willing to absorb something new and challenging, and most of all were generous to share their [sometimes newfound] talent in front of everyone. We made them dance, write, act, direct, make music, make art — and in the end, we were all very happy.
Thank you, Cultural Center of the Philippines Arts Academy [Chris Millado / Ron B. Mirabuena] and Silliman University Culture and Arts Council [Diomar Abrio] for making this possible. And congratulations to all my co-mentors [Dessa Quesada-Palm, Cheenee Vasquez Limuaco, Angelo Sayson, Aiken Quipot, Elvert Bañares, Juni Jay Tinambacan, Joseph Albert Perez Basa, W Don Flores, Ramon del Prado, and AK Ocol] for forming such a formidable group of resource speakers.
11:22 PM |
In Dumaguete, The Arts Flourish Part 8: Two Artists
It is not like art-making in Dumaguete has only now began to stir.
The thread of this series on Dumaguete art has always been about how it has thrived, despite the raging pandemic that continues to bedevil and challenge us to this day. The series has followed the string of openings of local galleries that found remarkable footing in the pandemic, and which have now come to shape how much Dumaguete makes, appreciates, and consumes art.
Young Dumaguete artists are coming into their own with astonishing fervency, more in control of the direction they want their art to take—making crucial professional stakes that, upon close scrutiny, were often brought about by realizations they have made about themselves during the lockdown.
Exhibits and performances outside of the academic ghetto, which used to control our cultural calendar, have now become staple fare for culture-hungry Dumagueteños, with new avenues opening up to replace the shuttered spaces the city’s universities used to provide. This is a seismic development, truth to tell.
And new cultural rituals are now being fostered among the locals: gallery-hopping, for example, has suddenly become a “thing,” even my 89-year-old mother is now doing it, much to my surprise and delight when I found about it.
Suddenly, our younger cohorts of visual artists—who have driven this surge, more or less—are now becoming more well-known locally, and gaining traction in terms of recognition nationally, earning not just plaudits but also patrons. This is important.
But for every Hersley-Ven Casero, Xteve Abanto, Jomir Tabudlong, Alta Jia, Iris Tirambulo, Totem Yap Saa, Flomil Rey Labarento, Gerabelle Rea, Faye Mandi, Deadlocks, Paul Benzi Florendo, Mikoo Cataylo, Sara Jean Ruales, Rianne Salvarita, Dan Dvran, and Cil Flores who are now revolutionizing local art not just with the flair of their vision but also the energy of their youth, we also have the Dumaguete visual artists who have come before them, many of whom continue to make great work, and who must be acknowledged.
The OGs of Dumaguete and Oriental Negrense visual arts across several generations—counting among them Albert Faurot [†], Jose Laspiñas [†], Paul Pfeiffer, Kristoffer Ardeña, Maria Taniguchi, Edmund Bendijo, Brenda Fajardo, Sharon Dadang, Babbu Wenceslao, Danni Sollesta, Francisco Villanueva, Hemrod Duran, Jana Jumalon, Razcel Jan Salvarita, Michael Teves, Mark Valenzuela, Susan Canoy, Jutze Pamate, Muffet Dolar Villegas [†], Kennedy Rubias [†], and Kitty Taniguchi—were instrumental in putting Dumaguete on the art map. They made the city the incubator of [and inspiration for] their art at the start of their careers, and many would later go on to make names for themselves in the national and international art world. They paved the way, so to speak. This meant many things: [1] defining [and redefining] what was “local” art, [2] founding [and sometimes detonating] artistic organizations and collaborations [and refining along the way what made for a “Dumaguete art community”], and [3] exploring various avenues of artistic execution and exhibition—mapping the successes and the failures along the way which became, more or less, the current template on which the contemporary art scene has finally developed.
This essay aims to explore the now and the then in that regard, to present two artists culled from these two sets of cohorts of Dumaguete art—Cristina Taniguchi and Cil Flores—to mark their generational differences and similarities, to note the convergences, and to find out how exactly how Dumaguete art has developed over the years in the light of the lives of two local artists.
* * *
Cil Flores is 28 years old, and the world is still all exciting possibilities—even if sometimes the doubts can still sting. On Facebook, she recently posted a screenshot of a quote, which served as a reminder: “Stop ignoring when your talents have been validated in multiple spaces. It’s not a gimmick, it’s not luck, it’s not a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. You are good at this thing. The proof is there. Accept it and act accordingly.” The quote had been culled from musician and writer Kaya Nova, and Cil annotated it with sad emojis.
The self-doubt is understandable—all artists worth their salt have lingering bouts of imposter syndrome—but as of the moment, Ms. Flores really has no cause for concern. Of late, she has been invited to become a participating artist for the Modern and Contemporary Art Festival (MoCAF), a new art festival in Manila that aims for a measure of dynamism in its curation, “to reflect the fast-developing modern and contemporary art scene in the Philippines.” She has been part of various group exhibitions since devoting fully to her art in 2018 as well—and has found herself becoming prolific in the pandemic, establishing relationships with patrons who now collect her art.
That has always been the dream, ever since she was young, although it never became apparent until the last four years. “I started drawing when I was in kindergarten,” she told me. “My sister and I did doodles a lot, and we’d make comic strips of the cartoons and anime we’d see on TV.” That love for doodling, for being creative, didn’t stop in childhood: “I continued drawing on cheap sketchbooks in high school and college, but I never saw art as a career option for me. I was sort of bound to pursue my psychology degree after graduating from college.” But then, a realization: “I somehow made a decision to pursue the path of becoming a professional artist.”
That path started in 2018, with pen and ink on paper as her main medium. It is a path that has only really begun—and to observe Cil Flores now is to see an artist slowly coming into her own, slowly maturing into her craft, slowly finding her voice and her style. It is exciting to take stock of what she has done so far, and to feel the great art that has yet to come. For one thing, she knows her influences—Filipino urban street artists such as SYN, Yeo Kaa, Froilan Calayag, Mister Sasquatch, and TRNZ, to name a few Manila-based artists, as well as international artists like Kim Jung Gi and Lauren Tsai. “I guess I could describe my art style as close to pop and street art, and I usually feature subjects like roots- and rock-like details, in bright red and yellow colors,” she said. “I don’t consider myself as a professional artist yet—just an emerging one. But I want be known as the artist who has passion and grit.”
She has a character she keeps depicting in her works of late—the avatar, if you will, of what she wants to express given her experiences and feelings. Its name is Clae. “Through Clae, I’ve been producing paintings, illustrations, and drawings that feature feelings and situations like hope, grief, frustration, letting go, healing, and even addiction,” she said.
One such piece featuring Clae is a painting titled “Today’s Best,” her entry for this year’s Graphika Manila art book, and the art work that marks the first appearance of this original character. “The work portrays hope in the form of a tiny spark amidst the anxiety, the bad days, the depressive episodes, the days when I feel like giving up. But no matter how tiny the spark is, it is still enough to motivate me to continue living, to keep making art, and to chase my dreams,” Ms. Flores said. “This is why this piece is very personal to me, and why it perfectly describes me as an artist who is determined and passionate about art, despite the struggles.”
What she ultimately hopes to achieve with her is the ability to connect with people. “That’s one of my main goals. If my art means a lot to people, and if I can somehow connect with them and give them inspiration or just simply produce art about situations which they can relate to, then that for me is success,” she said. “I’ve been receiving messages from aspiring creative—and even regular people—who tell me how my art means so much to them because it inspires them, and I have never felt so fulfilled.”
She usually stays up late at night to work as a part-time marketing VA. “But when I’m done working, I proceed to paint, to draw, or to do digital art, until 4 or 5 AM,” she said. “I paint or do art at night because it is the most peaceful time of my day for me. Then I wake up around noontime, have lunch, and proceed to do art again in the afternoon. I usually spend my afternoons doing brainstorming on new ideas for future art pieces. Sometimes I do art studies on paper, or digitally. Sometimes I watch videos of artist interviews.”
She surprised herself by becoming very productive during the pandemic. “I stayed home most of the time,” she remembered. “Although I had an 8-to-5 remote job back then, I was still able to make both traditional and digital art pieces. The quarantine and pandemic anxiety took a toll on me, but the art provided me with comfort. It was basically my refuge, my escape. I remembered making a digital artwork for Graphika Manila titled ‘Pandemic Blues,’ which portrayed what everyone was feeling and doing during the coronavirus crisis.”
What she hopes to do in the immediate future is to help lead the growth of street/urban/pop art in Dumaguete. “I’m also working on extending my reach outside of Dumaguete since I have goals to exhibit in galleries outside the city, especially in top galleries around Luzon.” To her surprise, she had recently received opportunities to exhibit in Manila this year. “That gave me hope, that it was entirely possible for a self-taught young artist from the province like me to gain traction in the Metro art scene. That’s why I’m motivated to work more on my art and my growth as an artist so I can be able to achieve those goals.”
Cil Flores, young artist on the verge.
* * *
On the opposite side of the spectrum is Cristina Taniguchi, the artist that has very much defined how we have known Dumaguete art for years and years. She has become its veritable synonym, and the art gallery she established has been the city’s solitary light in art exhibitions, more or less, for two decades. But a quick look at her story, especially her beginnings, reveals similarities to Cil Flores’ journey of becoming.
“It’s in my spirit. My direction has always been geared towards something creative,” Cristina Sollesta Taniguchi, Kitty to friends, once remarked in a 2013 interview, when she was asked to define the very start of her artistic journey. The creative spark she spoke of had always been inclined to the literary and the visual even in childhood, primarily as a means to establish camaraderie with others. “When I was little,” she would later tell me, “I used to entertain my cousins in Manila with stories and line drawings.”
Art as story.
That was the impulse. And she would carry that impulse further from her childhood in Manila, where she was born in 1952, to Dumaguete where she would grow up.
“In elementary school and in high school, I was always chosen as the class artist,” Ms. Taniguchi recalled. “In college, I won first prize in an on-the-spot painting contest, and after college, I started exhibiting my art works with my brother. I had my first solo show in Manila in the 1990s. This was how I started my artistic career.”
But to expand that nutshell of an artistic beginning, we need to know that the first instance of national recognition she received as a visual artist was an honorable mention she garnered at the 1994 Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards. She would continue participating in the competition in the next few years, and in 2000 and 2003, her works were declared finalists. Meanwhile, she enrolled at Silliman University, finishing her bachelor’s degree in Mass Communication in 1978 and her MA in English Literature in 1985. She wanted to tell stories by writing. She was also a faculty member at Silliman’s Department of English, Literature, and Creative Writing from 1984 to 1989. And then, after an exhibit with her brother Danni Sollesta at the Silliman Library in 1989, she realized this was what she really wanted to focus on—a career in the visual arts.
By the time the 1990s rolled around, she was becoming known in the national art scene for her paintings of luminous women surrounded by totems of mythological beings—sphinxes, angels, winged rams—mixed in with cheetahs and lions and flamingos. You could see traces of Chagall and Kahlo here and there, but the signature is most definitely and uniquely Cristina Taniguchi. Asked what particular piece by her defined her best as an artist, she said: ”Every piece of art that I produced is relevant to me. These are products of different times and periods in my art making, and each moment and effort I have dedicated to the finishing of each piece has its own narrative to tell, as well as theoretical knowledge to digest.”
“I began to take my art-making seriously as a career in the 1990s,” Ms. Taniguchi continued. ”I was intrigued by the new art concepts that were popping up at that time, things like neo-conceptualism and neo-expressionism.” She began to take note of the works of Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and began to study their approaches to art-making. Around her, local artists were subscribing to tenets of feminism and social realism, which also influenced her—“but I was also looking for my own personal kind of aesthetics and approach to art making,” she said. “From the very beginning, I knew that my art would be based on the concept of personal mythology. I was, and still I am, interested in the fundamentals of human existence and the universality of human life, more especially with regards the status quo of women.”
She began exhibiting in solo shows, including ones at the De La Salle University and at the Ayala Museum in Makati. Still, she could not entirely turn away from her literary beginnings. In 2002, she became a special fellow for poetry at the famous Dumaguete National Writers Workshop [now the Silliman University National Writers Workshop], especially handpicked by the late Edith L. Tiempo. [Two of her poems from that workshop, “I Went to Tokyo to Know Its Crows” and “Blue Space for the Crows Painted White,” were later published in 2006 in the now defunct the Philippines Free Press.] Those poems were also accompanied by artworks she made depicting crows, but the experience also made her realize that her creative force now primarily involved holding paintbrushes and clay, more than the pen. The need to tell stories now occupied primarily the visual.
Together with her daughter Maria Taniguchi, she was invited to do an exhibition for the centennial celebration of Silliman University in 2001, which became Pag-usbong Kalangitan. That same year, she exhibited Who Owns Women’s Bodies at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. In 2005, she was invited to her first international show, as an exhibit participant at the 2nd Beijing International Art Biennale Exhibit at the Millennium Center in Beijing, China—a feat she would repeat in the next two years. In 2010, she was one of the participating artists for The Sculpture Creative Camp at the 11th Asian Arts International Festival in Beijing, China. In 2012, she joined the 5th Luxor International Painting Symposium in Egypt.
Through it all, Dumaguete was home, her preferred base. “This place is my artistic nest,” she said. “I’ve produced most of my works in Dumaguete, and there’s no denying that this place has a lot of bearing in the making of my art. This place provides me the cosmic space and the time for the making of my art—this is where I digest everything.”
“Digesting” means staying put at Mariyah Gallery [a working gallery in Bogo that she established in 1992], dividing her days between doing domestic work in the morning and her art in the afternoon, and then “take care of matters pertaining to the gallery mostly in the evenings.”
Mariyah Gallery began on a lark—carved out of an existing house that sits on 7,000 square meters of property in the western fringe of Dumaguete City. It started out as a complement to a small restaurant she designed to be an alternative culinary experience from the eating establishments that dotted the Rizal Boulevard at that time. “Some good friends in Cebu City assisted me in putting up the place, from mere idea into materialization. The restaurant was honestly a bit out of the way—but the art gallery was really my main prerogative. I was already deep into the arts the year we opened the restaurant/gallery, and my aim was to see art and culture moving in the city when practically there was nothing happening at all.”
She realized even then, especially with the lack of a proper art scene in Dumaguete, the challenges involved in sustaining the venture. “It was hard to operate an art gallery in a place where the art market had not yet fully developed. This was a real challenge. I knew that the gallery couldn’t survive without other financial sources—but to be honest, I was not so concerned about that,” she admitted. “It was enough that I was able to make good use of the little space that we have. Even today, I feel the same.”
The specific challenges she faced in 1992 are the reasons why Mariyah Gallery does not have a regular monthly changing exhibition to this day. “Mariyah Gallery is not really a commercial gallery,” Ms. Taniguchi said. “Every time we organize art events with exhibitions, we have to shell out huge amounts for the expenses.” These are resources they do not readily have, so they have learned to do things in their own particular ways: “Over the years the gallery has undertaken many art and cultural activities, with partners. For example, we are advocates of terracotta art, so the gallery initiated—with the assistance and partnership of the Dumaguete City LGU—the first and second terracotta art festivals in 2006 and 2007, which landed full coverage in a national newspaper, a boon to city tourism.” The gallery has also served as conduit for other cultural organizations. In May 2008, for example, it collaborated with the Filipino Heritage Foundation to host the nationwide closing ceremony of the National Heritage Month.
“What Mariyah Gallery is,” Ms. Taniguchi continued, “is a working art gallery. What I mean is, our prime objective is not to show and sell. We partner with other organizations to move culture, and to undertake things for the sake of art alone. One very important event that we worked on was the Visayas Visual Artists Exhibit and Conference, or ViVA-ExCon. This was in 1992, and ViVA ExCon was still in its infancy. The event we initiated was actually just a small program of activities for Visayan artists, and our participation in it was just incidental—but it was good. Mariyah Gallery was able to open its space to wider horizons in the arts, and we were able get to know many of the significant art personalities in the Visayas, as well as from other parts of the country. To my mind, this event was instrumental in forging the present connectivity among artists in the Visayas specifically. Mariyah Gallery has historically grown with ViVA ExCon. The second ViVA-ExCon, held in Dumaguete in 1994, was the deciding point for the event to continue and mature—and we were a huge part in that undertaking.”
The pandemic was not disruptive in the flow she had already established in her daily routine as a working artist. “Except for the cancellation of some trips related to art activities and limited movement for the gallery, art life went—goes—on,” she admitted. “I was able to produce work that showed my response to the pandemic, as well as to some adverse events in our country, like the eruption of Taal in 2020.”
Mariyah Gallery, too, is surviving the pandemic. “We were able to hold two art exhibits in 2020 at the height of the pandemic,” Ms. Taniguchi said. “And in 2022, the gallery started welcoming visitors again, but limiting entry to around five people at a time. In 2021 we were able send works to Cebu to participate in the First Visayas Art Fair at Montebello Hotel. We were also able to participate in the online art sales of Art in the Park.” And Mariyah Gallery will continue to hold art activities, she said. Its art residency program will soon open again, with one Manila artist scheduled to take up residence soon; a preview art exhibit is already in the works.
And what of the future of her vocation?
“I am in the summit of my life,” Ms. Taniguchi said. “I don’t think about the future of my art anymore. It is just natural for me to do art every day, since it has become my way of life and career. The matter of the future of my art—I leave that to time. My art undergoes evolution as life goes on.”
6:07 PM |
In Dumaguete, The Arts Flourish Part 7: The NFT Nirvana of Meditating Cats
I know nothing about NFT art, but like many things, this is a perfectly good way to begin.
This is therefore an attempt at definition, and a scrutiny into what it has meant of late in the wider world, and finally an examination of how far Dumaguete art has taken to the trend, for better or for worse. It will also touch into meditating cats, but I’m getting ahead of my story.
To begin to know what NFT art is all about, one must start with untangling its acronym to its essentials. NFT means “non-fungible token,” and to get a clear picture of what that is, one needs to even go deeper and find exactly what its opposite—“fungible”—means.
Something is “fungible” if it is mutually interchangeable with another thing—in other word, it is still what it is when you replace it with another identical item, with the value remaining the same. For example, a fifty-peso bill is fungible with five pieces of ten-peso coins, and vice versa. A fifty-peso bill, therefore, is a “fungible token.”
Something however becomes “non-fungible” when there is a value added to an item, a value that remains undeterminable, because it can rise or fall depending on specific circumstances. Let’s take the same five pieces of ten-peso coins from the example above, for instance. Let’s say that these coins have been painstakingly glued together and transformed into an elegant small sculpture by the great modernist Ramon Orlina, and signed by the great artist himself. As a set of coins transformed into art, it is no longer the same five pieces of ten-peso coins that they were before. They have become a unique piece, and the value of this piece of art is no longer the old equivalent of fifty-pesos, so it cannot be interchanged with a monetary exchange of that value. If you are an avid collector of Ramon Orlina’s art, and if this art is truly unique among his creations, you will likely purchase this set of coins with a higher value—again, depending on circumstances. The piece therefore has become a “non-fungible token.”
This is the first thing one needs to know about NFTs.
Closer scrutiny will make you realize that NFTs as a whole, especially when it comes to art, truly reveals its province as one of “speculation,” and one that is tied to the idea of “investments.” The most avid collectors of NFT art essentially buy a nebulous promise that the pieces they have purchased will increase in value in the future. The market therefore is driven by speculation on crypto-currency.
This is the second thing one needs to know about NFTs.
Even closer scrutiny will reveal that when one owns NFT art, one only really owns its digital presence. It is therefore a completely digital asset, which is backed and authenticated by a unique digital footprint called a blockchain. A “blockchain” is a record of transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency [NFTs mostly use something called Ethereum, or ETH], which are maintained across several computers that are linked in a peer-to-peer network. A blockchain is a record that cannot be tampered with [or at least very difficult to], and thus guarantees authenticity. So when one buys NFT art, one really buys its digital presence, which can be authenticated by its connected blockchain. Other people may have copies of the same digital file of the art, may even own a physical iteration of it—but you alone is guaranteed to own its digital certificate of authenticity.
This is the third thing one needs to know about NFTs.
This third one is also the very heart with which I have always come to regard, for the longest time, NFT art with a good deal of suspicion. I just could not fathom being a collector and owning what seems to be just the “shadow” of the art I’m buying. For example, one of the biggest success stories being banded about regarding NFT art has been the sale of the popular meme, “Disaster Girl”—that piece of Internet curiosity showing a young girl smirking in front of a burning house—which garnered a record price of five hundred thousand dollars. The owner of that NFT art now has bragging rights to its digital authenticity—but the image itself is available to download and use by anyone who has an Internet connection.
When I first heard this, I shook my head at the seeming ridiculousness of it all—until I was reminded that most of the art world actually traffic in these “authenticity guarantees” and never usually with the physical art itself. You can, for example, cry yourself hoarse with declaring that a painting you own is an original, if obscure, Picasso. But unless you can have it authenticated as real—and the provenance of that painting well-documented—your “Picasso” might as well be a painting by your neighborhood artist who has no discernable claim to fame. If you think about it, the certificate that claims authenticity of a painting seems to have higher value compared to the painting itself.
This point was even driven deeper to me when I heard about the controversial banana and duct-tape installation by the Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan. His piece, titled “Comedian,” became an object of major scrutiny when it was exhibited in 2019 as part of Art Basel Miami—and then co-opted by Georgian performance artist David Datuna who walked up to the exhibit, detached the banana from its duct-tape, and proceeded to eat it. The whole drama ignited debates about the value of art and the meaning of art.
Truth to tell, anyone can actually “own” this piece by Cattelan, which the Guggenheim Museum in New York actually did in 2020. Anyone can also very well install “Comedian” by buying any banana from any grocery store and any duct-tape from any hardware store. But for the “value” to be “properly transferred,” it must come with a certificate from the artist himself asserting authenticity of the artwork; it also contains specific instructions regarding its installation, including that the banana—according to The Conversation’s Jo Adetunji—“should be hung 175 cm above ground and that it should be replaced every seven to ten days.” Again, it is not the physicality of the art that matters; it is the certification of authenticity. This is the art world that we live in right now.
And so, when it comes to NFT art, who says they have no value when you very well own the digital certificate asserting their authenticity and your ownership of it?
You can consider NFT art as a revolution, or as a disruptor to the old ways of art selling, and its current novelty has powered its surge of popularity in recent years. The surge can be traced to “Bored Ape Yacht Club” or BAYC, a collection of 10,000 unique, algorithm-generated variations of a cartoon image of an ape, developed by Yuga Labs LLC. When the collection went on sale in April 2021, it promised owners of the NFTs access to a private online club, exclusive in-person events, and intellectual property rights for the image. By 2022, sales of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs totalled over $1 billion—with owners including Justin Bieber, Jimmy Fallon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Stephen Curry, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Paris Hilton, and Timbaland. [Madonna reportedly paid for one BAYC image for $500,000.] And of course, where celebrities are, aspirational wannabes with money to spare will go—even when it just means sharing a virtual space with them. This partly explains the surge to buy BAYC NFTs.
Since then, other artists have followed Yuga Labs’ lead—including American musician Grimes, who garnered $6 million for his fantasy art. The Kings of Leon released an entire album as NFT art. And Paris Hilton entered ETH-space with pink animals and clouds. According to 99design’s Elena Fitzsimons, “NFT art is a totally new way of categorizing digital artworks that enables designers to monetize their work. It’s supposed to be a quicker process and a more accessible way for designers to produce work and reap the rewards for their creativity. There’s no chasing clients for payment, there’s no preparing files for print, and there’s no waiting to hear feedback or changing and editing your work to suit a client’s needs.”
This includes paving the way for artists to get royalties for their work, especially in future sales, and dismantling the old tyranny of physical spaces [read: galleries] selling physical art by moving the whole platform of selling art into a digital space and thus guaranteeing a global, unfettered, reach. It’s the art trade democratized: anyone, therefore, who has access to the Internet can mint their own NFT art.
But it’s not all roses. With competition now tight among designers and artists hoping to make a quick buck over this novelty, there’s really no guarantee one’s NFT art will sell, not even if you’re a celebrity. Wrestler and actor John Cena considers his own attempt at selling a collection he put together with the WWE as a “catastrophic failure.” Skater Tony Hawk was widely mocked, even by fans, when he announced he was selling NFTs of his “best skating moves.” There are also unexplored legal ramifications. When director Quentin Tarantino announced he was going to sell NFTs based on his screenplay of Pulp Fiction, he was sued by Miramax, the studio that distributed and funded the 1994 film.
Minting NFTs is also very expensive. According to Fitzsimons, “Designers must outbid each other to get their artwork ‘minted’ on Blockchain. Prices fluctuate, depending on time and network, but it ranges from anywhere between $80 to $1000. This fee doesn’t guarantee sales for designers, but without paying it they cannot list their artwork on the market.”
NFTs, like crypto-curreny, has also been under attack of late for extracting a huge environmental cost. Because the blockchain has to be minted and maintained by a network of computers, the ecological footprint of NFT art in terms of energy costs can be greater than its real-life alternative of maintaining a physical studio or gallery.
But as one friend once reacted to my initial suspicions about NFT art as a whole, “This is the future, my friend.” And there is no denying that this revolution has come, and will most likely stay—changing how we do art from now on.
In Dumaguete, the first instance we get of NFT art is “Meditating Cats” by Evgeniya Spiridonova, a Russian graphic artist and entrepreneur who has made Dumaguete her home for the past thirteen years. She has admittedly fallen for both the city’s low-key charms and artistic potential that she has founded the creative enterprise Pinspired Philippines to showcase what it has to offer, creativity-wise. [I have written extensively about Pinspired in a previous installment of this arts series, “From Russia with Love.”]
Ms. Spiridonova, or Jane as she is referred to more popularly by friends and associates in Dumaguete, once worked as graphic designer for a toy company in China for five years—a phase in her life that was soon interrupted by a series of personal challenges, including a breakup with a boyfriend and the death of her father. This plunged her into a vortex of depression, which she knew needed healing. She aimed for India, hoping to traverse the entire subcontinent for six months, and hoping that the sensory overload of this ancient world would somehow provide the necessary distractions that would initiate a deep discovery of self—which she hoped could also lead to healing. One particular experience she would remember most during that trip is an immersion into a particular meditative practice called Vipassana. It required the most extensive discipline—for ten straight days, she meditated but could not speak to anyone. The experience blew her mind, and she realized the importance of meditation in the practice of everyday life.
But for all the excitement she elicited from India, the trip did not completely heal her. What did heal her was finally coming home to Russia, where she would throw herself into her first solo exhibition dedicated to her late father. That was also when she made another realization: she wanted to make the creation of art the focus of her life.
These two elements—meditation and art—perfectly explain the genesis of her NFT creation, except for the specificity of cats. Why cats? I once asked her. “Why not cats?” she responded. And why did I even have to ask. Because why not cats? As a cat person myself, I knew the answer perfectly well: cats are adorable, they rule the Internet, and their very existence as pets is defined by the fact that they seemed almost undisturbed by everything around them. Very Zen-like, very meditative.
Meditating Cats exhibit in Salaya Beach Houses, May 2022
Meditation led by Ms. Betita-Tan at the closing of the Meditating Cats exhibit in Salaya
Some of the Meditating Cats
Jane and her Meditating Cats at the 6200 PopUp at Robinsons Place Dumaguete
“Every Meditating Cat NFT can be a talisman or a reminder for us to be calm and peaceful in any unknown situation,” Jane writes in her website for the project, which she developed with three other friends. “Our Meditation Cats bring positive mood and fun experience with catchy art ideas. Every Meditation Cat NFT can tell a story, as we have multiple and complex layers which create different situations where we can recognize ourselves.” Indeed, for “Meditating Cats,” Jane prepared extensively the layers that would go into the mix of the algorithm that would create a specific NFT cat. There are about nine of them—which determine the eyes, the mouth, the fur, the clothes, the necklace, the platform the cat is meditating on, the background, and the various interstitials the cat happens to be juggling. From the various combinations of these, one gets a unique cat in meditation pose in various arrays of stories—6,000 images in total. All handpicked, all triple-distilled, each one designed to appeal to a specific story you have about yourself. You like sushi? There’s a Meditating Cat that reflects that. You like chess? You like dreaming on a cloud? You see yourself as a punk? You see yourself as a ghost-hunter with a penchant for tea? You see yourself as a Christmas Ghostbuster with a love for sunflowers? The individual stories are strangely unique, and endlessly appealing.
She opened the sale of her NFT art last December 2021, offering each piece at 0,021 ETH [or the equivalent of PhP1,300 as of 12 July 2022] on the OpenSea platform. [OpenSea is the preferred marketplace for NFT artists.] By late May, she opened an exhibition of prints of handpicked physical iterations of some of these cats at Salaya Beach Houses in Dauin, completing the show in June with a meditation session with friends with Samyama Studio’s Paola Luisa Betita Tan in the lead. During the 6200 PopUp initiated by DTI Negros Oriental at Robinsons Place Dumaguete, which ran from July 1 to 7, she gave a talk on embarking in this new frontier for making and selling art, and exhibited some more of her Meditating Cats alongside another Dumaguete artist, Angelo Delos Santos, who has followed Jane’s lead by creating “Bored Baboons.”
NFT art is a gamble and an adventure, and is still largely a puzzle to many, but Jane feels like the right person in Dumaguete to take the lead. Her explorer’s foray into this digital jungle of art-making and art-trading is certainly interesting to watch, and perhaps to emulate. This is the future, after all, and we have no other recourse but to yield to it sooner or later.
10:27 PM |
In Dumaguete, The Arts Flourish, Part 3: From Russia, With Love
Pinspired’s Evgeniya Spiridonova is the other half of Dakong Balay Gallery’s success story—although her contributions to the contemporary Dumaguete arts scene extends far beyond partnering on events in the venue. Hers actually is illustrative of the usual Dumaguete love story: she started out as a langyaw [stranger] like so many Dumagueteños nga na-dagit by the city—and, after settling down to make a life here, is now a vibrant part of the community fabric, helping push the potentials of her adopted city.
We call her Jane.
She was born in small city in Russia. Her father, who was a sound engineer, recognized in his daughter an affinity for the world outside, and so he encouraged her to learn the English language. He was himself an avid travel around the world because of his profession, and he knew the power of knowing a language that everyone understands—and this was key to Jane’s ready embrace of the world.
She would eventually earn a degree in English linguistics, but she knew deep inside that she also wanted to do something creative besides tinkering with language structures. Ien her sophomore year, she made the decision to shift to evening classes so that she could spend the day working. She was already skilled in Photoshop, and found work as a graphic designer for a succession of companies. Including the Russian publishing company Eksmo. It was a career in the Russian corporate world that lasted for ten years.
Eventually, she would find herself working in China, creating packaging for a toy company and occasionally being given the opportunity to design toys herself. The work was fruitful, and lasted for four years—and in the interim, she was developing her skills in illustration, and dreaming of putting up her own design company someday. This pushed her to quit her job in China, and with a friend started her own graphic design company. It didn’t last long, and there were also other mitigating circumstances that made her reassess what she wanted in life. One of these was the death of her father. She flew back to Russia, and in the aftermath of her grief, she devoted herself to her art—experimenting with ink and mixed media, playing with seashells and sound equipment. This would lead to her first solo exhibition in Russia. She knew now that what she really wanted to do was art.
She would find the answer to that calling in the Philippines. She came to the country upon the invitation of the filmmaker and photographer Maxim Vasiliev, who is also Russian. He had been living in the Philippines for eleven years, and when Jane came to visit, he introduced her to Dumaguete City and its environs—the Rizal Boulevard, Casaroro Falls, the Balinsasayao Twin Lakes. “I immediately fell in love with the place,” Jane recalled. “[It was] because of the vibrant green and the blue [I saw everywhere in nature.] I loved the warm weather, and I loved the friendly English-speaking people.” She also loved the ease of the place, the accessibility to everything. Jane also fell in love with Mr. Vasiliev, and that sealed the deal. They married, and she decided to move to Dumaguete—but only later would she discover how much of a trove it was when it came to the arts.
“To be honest, I didn’t see [how deeply artistic Dumaguete was] at first,” she said. “There were not many galleries in the city. I saw artworks displayed mostly in local restaurants and art supply shops.” Only later, when she slowly began meeting local artists, did she realize the potential of Dumaguete as a vibrant artistic hub. She wanted to do something about it. But first, she had to develop a business that could sustain her family—and later on, her dreams of Dumaguete art. That meant establishing Pinspired, which means “Pinoy-inspired.”
“When I came here, I was so inspired by the Philippines that I decided that my next business will be connected with this beautiful country,” she said. “When I was searching for good postcards and art souvenirs to send to my family [back in Russia], I couldn’t find anything [I liked] here.” Jane stumbled on that lack, which gave her the idea of creating postcards herself and try to make a business out of it.
The first postcard she designed was a map of Negros Island. Then this turned into a collection of ten other Philippine islands maps. In 2017, she opened an online shop for her growing inventory. “Our first customers were Philippine post-crossers from online group,” Jane said. “Then we started to sell outside Negros Island, to other [places that catered to tourists].”
Postcards paved the way to her eventual collaboration with other local artists and creatives. “We started to expand our postcard collections, featuring artists like Angelo Delos Santos, Cil Flores, Kat Banay, and others.” The response to these collaborations was electric and positive, and Jane soon realized that this was how she wanted to pursue her business—to showcase the beauty of the localities and their traditions through postcards and collectibles, with art by local artists. “We wanted to achieve recognition among the locals. We wanted to tell about Philippine plants and animals, places, traditions—but in a quirky way,” she said. “We also wanted to satisfy the demand in affordable art, and provide creative gift solutions. At the same time, we really wanted to support local artists.”
This newfound approach to doing Pinspired led to her first art exhibition in Dumaguete in 2019. The show was going to center on something specific, and quirky. And musical.
The ukulele. More specifically: “art” ukulele.
The show, titled Reasons to Love the Philippines, embodied the new approach Pinspired was taking. Jane invited seven local artists—Portia Nemeño, Kevin Cornelia, Kat Banay, Alta Jia, Sarah Jean Ruales, Angelo Delos Santos, and Cil Flores—to do art on locally crafted ukuleles. The result astonished her. “I didn’t expect all of them would be so beautifully done,” she remembered. “Each one was so creative.” They exhibited the art ukuleles first at The Flying Fish Hostel and then at Alima Café—and all of them sold out in a few weeks. The proceeds went to support the Little Children of the Philippines, an orphanage in Dumaguete City. This was a good start.
There were other small exhibits, and then the pandemic hit.
But Jane knew that with every challenge came a corresponding opportunity—and the times were indeed challenging. How do you sell postcards when there are no tourists? How do you sell art souvenirs when there are no exhibits? How do you sell to the other islands when all means of transportation was closed? These were perplexing questions that challenged the new business—and her solution was simple: open a physical shop, even in the midst of the pandemic.
The Pinspired shop at Dakong Balay opened in December 2020—and the rest, including the subsequent exhibits at the new gallery on the second floor, proved to be the saving grace for the business. The company started to take producing art prints seriously, and Pinspired collaborated with more artists, producing many limited edition art prints and launching a program where every sold art print supported the artist directly.
There was another unlikely lifeline: publishing. Specifically, publishing art books. They started by publishing Hersley-Ven Casero’s first book of photography—All in Good Time—which they released in August 2021. It sold out within a month. Then in 2022, they published my children’s book The Great Little Hunter, with art by Mr. Casero—and it sold out within 27 hours. “I never thought we could become a publisher, but actually having art books with local artists reflected Pinspired’s vision,” Jane said. “Before, we were pretty much dependent on tourists, but with such projects as art books and art prints, we now have more recognition among the locals.”
Pinspired will continue to organize and sponsor different exhibits and art events around Dumaguete—this is already part of Jane’s vision. This also means collaborating with more artists and creating more products together, which reflect local traditions, culture, and places in the most artistic and creative way. This also means reaching out further to the community by organizing creative workshops and providing a space where artist and patron can meet. Of course, this means being smart about art as a business as well. “We plan to expand our product line to things which everyone needs, like T-shirts, tote bags, and towels.” All that with local art.
Jane envisions Pinspired to be a chain of shops found all over Philippines, like Papelmeroti, promoting and supporting artists from different parts of the country. “Every part of Philippines is unique,” she said, “and there are so many possibilities weee can give to local artists: from sustainable income to promotion, from introducing them to their customers to providing full time jobs. I hope in the future we will have a creative space where artists from all over the country can come, receive support, showcase their art and vision, and contribute to the local culture.”
Pinspired has started on that road—and not even a pandemic can stop it.
Evgeniya Spiridonova with her current exhibit of NFT art, Meditating Catse, at Salaya Beach Houses in Dauin.
10:16 PM |
In Dumaguete, The Arts Flourish, Part 2: An Unlikely Beginning
The story begins in the pandemic and the simplicity of what that entailed: a city in lockdown. For most of 2020, almost nothing stirred. Dumaguete, like most of the world, was in forced hibernation mode. We were trapped in our houses, and we were trapped in the mental haze of an existential prison that made us think of the outside world and of interacting with other people as something to be completely avoided. But some of us made that stasis a fertile ground for application and creativity: we cooked, we baked, we put up small businesses that catered to the paranoia of the pandemic, we tended to plants. We also gave small concerts over live streaming, we pursued our dormant desires for sculpting and dancing, we wrote stories, we painted and drew. All done within the confines of our pandemic bubbles.
And so, while there were no more public concerts and exhibits and readings, Dumaguete artists made art in the privacy of their houses and apartments—to bide the long stretches of time, to slay the encroaching depression, to feel alive. This created a great hunger to share what they made. But for now, they would have to deal with the simple matter of gestating. The first year of the pandemic was not a complete cultural wasteland, however. Some brave souls put up theatrical presentations even with all the COVID-19 protocols they had to follow. In one play I attended sometime in November 2020, there were only about ten people in the audience, not counting the cast and creative crew.
The first instance of this story of flourishing of Dumaguete art amidst the pandemic began as an accident, and not even with an artist. Her name is Amy Jean Concepcion Lee, a management graduate of Silliman University and a native of Tanjay City. Straight out of college in 2014, she began working as a commercial property manager at SL Teves Realty and Development Corporation, and one of the properties she was tasked to manage for the company was Dakong Balay along Rizal Avenue. A heritage house located along Rizal Avenue, Dakong Balay is famously the former residence of the late provincial governor Serafin Lajato Teves and counts among the mansions along the Dumaguete seafront collectively known as the “sugar houses.” After being left vacant for so long, the house was finally restored by the family, and retrofitted to become a commercial venue. [It currently houses Starbucks and Gerry’s Grill.]
Ms. Lee did not even have an inkling about the Dumaguete arts scene. “The term ‘art scene’ in general is alien to me,” she confessed. That is until she met Evgeniya Spiridonova, Jane to friends and the founder of Pinspired Philippines. In February 2020, Ms. Spiridonova inquired about renting a space at Dakong Balay, and in her proposal she mentioned art pieces and exhibitions with local artists. “These were names I’ve never heard of before,” Ms. Lee said. “Being an outsider, I never really saw the possibilities, because I had no clue it existed in the first place. But Jane was opening Pinspired during the holidays [in 2020], so we expected people to come. However, this was also when COVID-19 cases were rising.”
She continued: “I wanted to ensure Jane a successful opening, so I brainstormed [for] the best way to get people to come. I recalled a section of her proposal where she [wanted to hold] an art exhibit featuring local artists, so I figured we’d do something like that. A quaint spot at the second floor of Dakong Balay was at our disposal, so we made use of its vacancy.”
After an exchange of ideas between her and Ms. Spiridonova, they decided to collaborate with local visual artist Hersley-Ven Casero. Dakong Balay Gallery was born, and Mr. Casero would become its founding artist. The show they produced, Organic Magic, opened on January 2021—and proved to be an immediate hit, and a surprise. Was Dumaguete now ready for public exhibitions and similar events? Perhaps not—but Mr. Casero’s show demonstrated a hunger for the arts and culture, something that was denied of everyone for many, many months while the pandemic simmered.
“All these invisible strings tying us together finally untangled, and slowly we unraveled these amazing opportunities along the way,” Ms. Lee said in retrospect. “But still, since I have no experience in handling a gallery, setting the terms and regulations was one of the challenges I faced. Despite the challenges, hearing great feedbacks from the community, receiving guidance from experienced people, and getting the support and trust from my company, inspired me to continue the idea of a gallery in Dakong Balay, with blessings from the corporation.”
After the success of Organic Magic, the three were on “an exhibit high.” Mr. Casero suggested a group show slated for February 2021, which is traditionally the National Arts Month. What came out of this idea was Atoa, another pathbreaking exhibit that introduced further the space to a wider array of artists and art lovers. A month later, it showcased another group show called Introspection, a survey of local abstract art that was probably the best visual arts show in Dumaguete in recent years.
“We were able to gather many local artists to participate,” Ms. Lee recalled. “The unity manifested through that event ignited others, making the local artistic community of Dumaguete come alive. It has been heart-warming to witness Dakong Balay become a bridge of sorts, allowing local artists the avenue to showcase their art, especially during the pandemic—a time we needed connection the most.“
Dakong Balay Gallery effectively became the de facto exhibition space for Dumaguete artists, who were hungry for just this kind of avenue especially during the pandemic. For the longest time, in the old normal, there were only restaurants and hotels—like Café Alima and Flying Fish Hostel—that served as avenues for exhibitions, although they were hardly the ideal. There was also Mariyah Gallery in Bogo, which houses the works of Kitty Taniguchi, Maria Taniguchi, and Danni Sollesta, among others. Over at Silliman University, there were exhibition spaces at the Luce Foyer Gallery and the Silliman Library Gallery, and for a time, when the Ariniego Art Gallery was built in 2017, there was promise of a resurgence of a sustained calendar of art shows. When the university locked down for the pandemic like the rest of the city, these venues—ensconced deep in the middle of the sprawling campus and away from the easy access off city streets—became ghosts, inaccessible to most. Dakong Balay Gallery, situated along the Rizal Boulevard and housed in a magnificent heritage architecture, proved just the opposite: that accessibility and strategic location and that architectural beauty made it the unexpected hub to germinate an artistic resurgence, however unintentional.
“The gallery was initially just a space utilized for Pinspired’s opening show—basically just for marketing purposes,” Ms. Lee admitted. “However, the motive shifted, developed, and morphed into a popular space for the Dumaguete art scene.” Dakong Balay is now space that is well-known among many people, entertaining a constant stream of visitors. Part of its appeal is that admission to Dakong Balay Gallery is free.
But what’s in its future? “Our focus for now is showcasing our local artists,” Ms. Lee said, “but in the future we plan to invite artists from other places and at the same time do exciting collaborations with them. Just as the arts continue to evolve over the years, our exhibitions will have to be more inclusive and innovative.”
Dumaguete feels like a town wallowing in dread. Or if not that, a city with no one smiling. There is a heaviness in the air I cannot begin to describe. No proverbial dancing in the streets the way it had been in 2016 — even when my heart broke then, I knew many people were happy. Everywhere I go, I get stopped by friends and acquaintances who tell me they’re sad. I thought I was projecting, and paid no mind — but even my friend the visual artist Hersley-Ven Casero, who has been by choice apolitical, captured this feeling today. Hersley is the one person I know who has an intuitive connection to the air, to the spirits that engulf us. He is currently traveling, and at the Dumaguete airport, he posted something on his FB: “Mao ni first time namu mo-travel karon by plane since last time sa pre-pandemic… Naa gyud kausbanan. Mingaw og lahi kaayo ang feeling. Di pa nako masabtan ang akong gibati. Pero, basun moabot ra ang adlaw nga mahibal-an na nako unsaon pagdescribe sa feeling. Basta mura’g mingaw sya.”
It’s despair. It’s probably collective dread. It’s probably buyer’s remorse for those who suddenly realised what their vote has done.
“Maanad ra nya ko ani…,” Hersley finally added. I agree with him. We will get used to smelling the stillborn air, but I know I will resist till I and everyone else can smell the fresh air of good governance.
1:36 PM |
The CCP Kaisa Sa Sining Visayas Network Announces the Recipients of the 1st KSSLAP Awards
They finally released the news! I’m honored to be one of the first recipients of the Cultural Center of the Philippines [CCP] Kaisa sa Sining Visayas Network’s KSSLAP Awards, a recognition for artists, cultural workers, and cultural organizations in the Visayas. It’s humbling to be part of this roster, especially since many of them have been people I've looked up to in the cultural work that I do. Thank you, CCP, for the recognition!
The Cultural Center of the Philippines [CCP] Kaisa Sa Sining [KSS] Visayas Network announces the recipients of the 1st KSSLAP [Kaisa Ini sa Sining, Lunsay nga Artistang Pilipino] Awards. Due to the present quarantine and travel restrictions, the KSSLAP Awards Ceremonies will be held virtually this 24-27 August 2021 and will be aired via the CCP FB page in September.
The awardees are Lutgardo Labad (Bohol / theater and cultural administration), Alphonsus Tesoro (Capiz / cultural administration), Marilyn Gamboa (Negros Occidental / cultural administration), Ian Rosales Casocot (Dumaguete / literature), Peque Gallaga (Bacolod / film and theater), Jess de Paz (Tacloban / dance), Dr. Jesus C. Insilada (Calinog-Iloilo / literature and cultural education), Dr. Elizabeth Susan Vista-Suarez (Dumaguete / music), Dennis Sugarol (Cebu / music), Negros Cultural Foundation, Silliman University Culture and Arts Council, Calbayog City Arts and Culture Office, and the Youth Advocates Through Theater Arts (Dumaguete).
The Kaisa sa Sining Regional Arts Centers is a partnership program of the CCP thru its Cultural Exchange Department (CED) that was launched in 2014 and is aimed at strengthening further the CCP’s linkages and cooperation with regional educational institutions, non-government organizations and local government units in order to broaden public participation in the arts, promote and showcase artistic excellence and facilitate a vibrant collaboration between and among communities. In the past seven years, the cooperation and exchanges between and among CCP and the KSS network have become more dynamic. To date, the KSS network has already grown to a total of 56 organizations in 46 areas/communities in the regions: 21 in Luzon, 17 in Visayas and 18 in Mindanao.
The KSSLAP Awards is a recognition for outstanding artists, cultural workers and organizations, was one of the action plans and projects that the KSS Visayas agreed to implement during a KSS regional forum held in Roxas City last 2018. In fulfillment of this plan, the CCP CED facilitated the conceptualization and planning of the project. In the last quarter of 2019, a five-member technical working committee (TWC) was formed composed of key representatives from four KSS Visayas organizations with CED as the lead facilitator. The program guidelines were made and disseminated to all the KSS Visayas network in February 2021. The nomination period was from February-May 2021. The Selection Committee (SC) was formed in May 2021 composed of prominent leaders/artists/practitioners from various communities and sectors in Visayas. The final evaluation and selection were held online on 8-9 July 2021.
The KSSLAP Awards aim to give recognition to deserving Visayan individuals and/or organizations who have exemplified commendable work and services in cultural and artistic endeavors, and have been in the forefront of the research, development, preservation, education and promotion of arts and culture in Mindanao for at least ten (10) years or more. The general criteria indicates that an awardee must have made exceptional accomplishments in creative work, leadership, resource management, education, artist support, audience development, community service, solidarity, and partnership.
Why is it important to recognize the achievements of the artists, cultural workers and organizations in Visayas?
Dr. Anita Illenberger [Former Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, Central Philippine University Iloilo City, former Director of the CPU Cultural Affairs Office, and former President of the Iloilo Arts Council]: “The Ksslap Award serves as an inspiration to fellow Visayans as it becomes a proof of the value of work, gives approval/gratitude for excellent work, embodies a sense of ownership that makes the community become aware of the shared outstanding accomplishments. In time, significant work of art becomes part of the cultural heritage of the region which gives the people sense of unity, sense of belonging, and personal identity to help every generation understand the region's cultural life, values and traditions.”
Rene G. Hinojales [Professor at the University of St. La Salle Bacolod City, former Chair, USLS Performing Arts Department, and Artistic Director-Jean Baptist Dance Co.]: “KSSLAP Awards go out on a limb to acknowledge valuable and commendable contributions of artists, cultural workers and organizations to the research, development, preservation, education and promotions of Philippine art and culture, specifically in the Visayas. Of course, recognition is not going to be perfect, especially when it comes from your peers. It may not always reinforce all the behaviors we are hoping to foster. But it sets a model! It creates that potential — and it fuels the idea that every person plays a role in building a positive world. And that is a powerful thing to recognize! On this first year of KSSLAP Awards Visayas, I trust and expect that this biennial act of recognition has and will continue to help everyone else understand what being exceptional looks like, sounds like and feels like!”
Marianito J. Luspo [Consultant of the Center for Culture and Arts Development, Province of Bohol and Director of the Cultural Affairs and Development Office, Holy Name University, Tagbilaran City]: “Artists and cultural workers are like stars in the night sky. They not only lighten up our otherwise dreary existence, they capture our attention and inspire us to look up to realities higher, more transcendent dimension of human life. Moreover, when we recognize each star, each cluster – Sirius, Betelguese or the Southern Cross – lone artist, independent cultural worker or group, we humanize them, making them easier for us, yet earth-bound fellow travelers, to emulate and aspire for. We therefore congratulate the CCP Kaisa sa Sining Visayas for giving recognition to our outstanding artists and cultural workers in the Visayas. The award will surely go a long way in encouraging our people in dedicating their lives in the pursuit of creative endeavors.”
Chinggay J. Bernardo [CCP CED Department Manager]: “In our four decades of community cultural outreach work, we have experienced the unique and exceptional artistry, dedication and perseverance of many Visayan artists and cultural workers. It is indeed high time to institutionalize an awards program that will give recognition to outstanding achievements of Visayan artists, cultural workers and organizations. The KSSLAP Awards, an initiative of the CCP KSS Visayas network and facilitated by the CCP Cultural Exchange, will serve as an inspiration for the artistic and cultural communities in the Visayas to aim for excellence and do public/community service.“
The 17 members of CCP KSS Visayas network are: Province of Capiz, University of Antique, Central Philippines University [Iloilo City], Municipality of Sta. Barbara-Iloilo, University of St. La Salle [Bacolod City], Negros Cultural Foundation, City of Bago, City of Himamaylan, Municipality of Murcia, Silliman University [Dumaguete City], Holy Name University [Tagbilaran City], Arts Council of Cebu, Calbayog City Arts and Culture Office, University of Eastern Philippines [Catarman, Samar], Leyte Normal University [Tacloban City], City of Ormoc, and St. Joseph College [Maasin, Leyte].
For more information, contact the CCP CED at ccp.ced2014@gmail.com
12:25 PM |
Statement on the Reclamation Project from Concerned Writers and Artists of Dumaguete
We, the concerned artists and writers in Dumaguete City, stand against the railroading of the 174-hectare reclamation project. An undertaking of this magnitude—one that can cause irreversible and catastrophic damage to interconnected ecosystems—should not only undergo public scrutiny, but careful and thorough deliberations from experts across different sectors as well.
We stand with fisherfolks whose livelihoods rely on what the seas have to offer and whose work provides the daily sustenance of several communities in the city.
We stand with those in coastal communities whose homes are now threatened by private encroachment.
We stand with environmentalists, marine biologists and scientists—those who tirelessly study and conserve marine biodiversity; those who have worked so hard to rehabilitate and protect Dumaguete’s coastal features; those who do the thankless job of educating us now about the complex entanglements of such delicate ecosystems.
We stand with residents of Dumaguete who now face yet another wave of gentrification and displacement—for who else would be able to afford the skyrocketing property value and increased cost of living once these condos and malls are built?
We stand with policy-makers who say yes to development but not at the expense of the environment.
We stand with lawyers and law practitioners who use their expertise to unpack and explain in detail the potentially exploitative nature of the JVA—something that the elected officers should have done for their constituents, even before agreeing to it.
We stand with the students, youth groups and young professionals in Dumaguete who went all the way to organize a massive show of opposition; to let their voices be heard since they are the ones who will inherit the problems created by this generation.
We stand with Bughaw, the lone pygmy blue whale who sometimes lingers off the coast of Dumaguete, and all marine lives who also call the waters of Negros their home.
There is more to development than just sci-fi utopian aesthetics. The future that we should be aiming for is one that is sustainable and climate-resilient; a future that is inclusive and equitable. Lest we forget, environmental protection is vital to a successful economic development.
Art does not exist in a vacuum—it is grounded and informed by the socio-political struggles of our time. As such, we strive to commit in illuminating, critiquing and challenging injustices that impact our society and immediate community. We call on fellow artists, writers and cultural workers to register your dissent and speak up against the 174 Reclamation Project.
SIGNATORIES:
Xteve Abanto, visual artist [new]
Edlyn Abrio, visual artist
Bea Bianca Acas, theatre artist
Annabelle Adriano, writer
Michael Angelo Alano, cultural worker
Stanley Alcala, filmmaker
Merlie Alunan, writer
Andrew Alvarez, filmmaker and musician
Cesar Ruiz Aquino, writer [new]
Kristoffer Ardeña, visual artist
Simon Anton Diego Baena, writer
Andy Bais, theatre artist
Bea Banzuela, photographer
Lendz Barinque, writer and filmmaker
Theodore Boborol, filmmaker
Luigi Borromeo, photographer
Raffy Cabristante, songwriter [new]
Urich Calumpang, photographer
Zhel Calumpang, visual artist
Hersley-Ven Casero, photographer and visual artist
Ian Rosales Casocot, writer
Ramon Adonis Catacutan, visual artist
Kenneth Catipay, theatre artist
Dyck Cediño, visual artist
Nikki Cimafranca, theatre artist Elsa Victoria Coscolluela, writer [new]
Maverick Rainier Cuello, photographer
Sharon Rose Dadang Rafols, visual artist
JR Dalisay, videographer [new]
Tara Eunice de Leon, writer
Ludendorffo Decenteceo, theatre artist
Angelo Delos Santos, visual artist
Jeauel Deen Diagmel, visual artist
Elle Divine, visual artist
Dan Dvran, visual artist and fashion designer
Hemrod Duran, visual artist
Jean Claire Dy, writer and filmmaker
Paul Benzi Sebastian Florendo, photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist
Cil Flores, visual artist
W Don Flores, visual artist
Denniz Futalan, photographer
Sigrid Gayangos, writer
Michael Aaron Gomez, writer
Ma. Isabel Gutang, visual artist
Bret Jackson, film actor and musician
Maya Jajalla, filmmaker
Jana Jumalon-Alano, visual artist
Francis James Kho, filmmaker
Mark James Kho, filmmaker
Junsly Kitay, theatre artist [new]
Flomil Rey Labarento, visual artist
Irma Lacorte, visual artist
Susan Severino Lara, writer
Kenzo Laxina, photographer
KM Levis, writer
Cheenee Vasquez Limuaco, dance artist
Amiel Lopez, writer
John R. Lumapay, theatre artist
Jessica Lupisan, visual artist
Frances Makil Ignacio, theatre artist
Ben S. Malayang III, writer
Faye Mandi, visual artist
Steven Michael, visual artist
Grace Monte de Ramos, writer
Andre Snoopy Montenegro, photographer
Krystann Dave Morong, visual artist
Alana Narciso, writer
Vic Nocete, dance artist
John Macklien A. Olandag, writer
Jean Henri Oracion, photographer
Dessa Quesada-Palm, writer and theatre artist
Jirah Martweven Palopalo, theatre artist
Chanel Pepino, visual artist
Paul Pfeiffer, visual artist
Onna Rhea Cabio Quizo, visual and theatre artist
Ted Regencia, writer
Lina Sagaral Reyes, writer
Dominique Kylene B. Roleda, writer
Sarah Jean Ruales, visual artist
Totem Yap Saa, visual artist
Jean Aldemer Seroje Salgados, writer
Paola Salutin, visual artist
Ra'z Salvarita, visual artist
Yudi Santillan III, writer
Lakambini Sitoy, writer
Jomar Allan Solania, filmmaker
Danilo Luces Sollesta, visual artist
Ned Solis, photographer
Lorie Jayne Soriano, musician and filmmaker John Fergus Lloyd Stevenson, photographer and filmmaker [new]
Sonia B. SyGaco, writer
Elaine Tacubanza, photographer
Rojan Bungcasan Talita, theatre artist
Anthony L. Tan, writer
Cristina Taniguchi, visual artist
Earnest Hope Tinambacan, writer, musician, and theatre artist
Iris Tirambulo, visual artist
Renz Torres, writer and filmmaker
Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas, writer
Risa Mei Tubio, visual artist
Joshua Umbac, writer
Danielle Ureta-Spontak, writer and filmmaker
Mariana G. Varela, visual artist and filmmaker
Junelie Velonta, writer
Joel M. Villanueva Jr., writer
Alex Villarino, visual artist
Lyde Gerard Villanueva, writer
Shareen Anjali Bael Warad, filmmaker
Babbu Wenceslao, visual artist [new]
Katrina Yaco, filmmaker
This opportunity for obit writing for the Cultural Center of the Philippines is such a humbling task. I’m learning so much about fantastic artists and cultural workers I didn’t even know before. [Like Rey Paz Contreras, who should be a National Artist for Sculpture.] And gaining huge respect for those I know only superficially. [Like the comedian Shalala Reyes.] I’m regularly kicking myself for being ignorant about them before they died. You also sense the struggles they went through just to do their work, often with the paltriest of recognition. Sometimes, in our research, the obits one finds online, if any, are so shallow [mostly consisting of embeds of social media posts by friends] — and one sadly realizes there really is no tradition of comprehensive obituary writing in the country. I’m glad CCP saw fit to devote an entire project to this.
[85th of 100]. I never thought of including documentaries in this list, because that felt like another list deserving of its own spotlight. Truth to tell, my favorite documentaries number beyond a hundred, and I actually do have a stronger preference for non-fiction. I thought that including this tradition of cinema in this list might eclipse narrative film altogether -- but nearing the tail-end of this endeavour, I've realized what a taxing, if also rewarding, exercise this has been, and I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to do the same for documentary films. And so I am placed in the most excruciating of positions: to choose just one favorite among the many. I could go the classic route and choose Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat or Nanook of the North or Man With a Movie Camera. Or I could go for the iconic and choose Grey Gardens or Woodstock or Salesman or the Up Series. Or I could go to the poetic and choose Baraka or Nostalgia for the Light or Microcosmos or Aquarela or Last and First Men or Honeyland. Or I could go for the strange and choose The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On or Gates of Heaven or Catfish. Or I could go for the historical and choose Last Days of Vietnam or The Act of Killing or The Kingmaker or Batas Militar or The Missing Picture or Night & Fog or Shoah. Or I could go for the scientific and choose A Brief History of Time or Aliens of the Deep. Or I could go for personal chronicles of uncommon or disrupted lives and choose As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty or Sunday Beauty Queen or Capturing the Friedmans or Stories We Tell or Three Identical Strangers. Or I could go for hero-making biographies such as Citizen Jane: Battle for the City or RBG or I Am Not Your Negro. Or I could go for the observational and choose At Berkeley or Ex Libris: The New York Public Library. Or I could go for the controversial and go for Olympia or Mondo Cane or The Thin Blue Line or Roger & Me or Deliver Us From Evil or Jesus Camp or An Inconvenient Truth or Waltz With Bashir or Hail, Satan? or The Terrorists or The Aristocrats or The Cove or Super Size Me. Or I could go for the delightful and choose Spellbound or Wordplay or Kedi or March of the Penguins. Or I could go for the suspenseful and choose Free Solo. Or I could go for the intellectual and choose Derrida or Public Speaking or Regarding Susan Sontag. I love films about gay concerns, and I could choose The Celluloid Closet or Paris is Burning or Before Stonewall or The Times of Harvey Milk or Tickled or The Case Against 8. I love films about artists in pursuit of their craft, and I could easily go for Jiro Dreams of Sushi or Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse or City of Gold or Exit Through the Gift Shop or Style Wars or Helvetica or De Palma or Everything is Copy: Nora Ephron, Scripted and Unscripted or Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold or What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael or Waking Sleeping Beauty or Seymour: An Introduction or Cutie and the Boxer or Hitchcock/Truffaut or The Price of Everything or Shirkers or Unzipped or Madonna: Truth or Dare or Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry or Spielberg or Six by Sondheim or Ballet 422 or Pina or Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel or Jodorowky's Dune or Man on Wire or Becoming Mike Nichols or The Kid Stays in the Picture or Mori: The Artists Habitat or Bill Cunningham New York or The First Monday in May or Finding Vivian Maier or The Decline of Western Civilization or The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness or Tim's Vermeer or Faces, Places or Filmworker or Crumb. Do you see what I mean? It's an impossibility, so I'll choose something that I've found myself perpetually delighted by even in repetition -- and if you've noticed, I have a particular weakness for documentaries about artistry and creatives. And I've chosen the 2009 documentary by R.J. Cutler about the making of Vogue Magazine's heftiest, and most sought after, monthly issue. I love the film because it is ostensibly a work documentary following American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour -- clearly her personal response to The Devil Wears Prada, the fictional expose, in book and subsequent film adaptation, that dared bear her alleged workplace toxicity. But in following their subject around as she goes through the grind of finishing the most demanding issue of the year, the film finds itself becoming a treatise about staying true to one's artistic vision under the heels of pedestrian and commercial concerns. It makes that turn when it discovers editor Grace Coddington, the perfect foil to Wintour and her struggles to juggle the demands of the bottomline, editing just enough of the artistry to populate the meager page counts with, and staying right ahead or on top of the cutting edge of fashion's many dicta. It is clearly not an enviable job, and I can understand the icy stance Wintour puts on, perhaps as shield to the hard editorial decisions she has to make. But this also makes out Coddington as the free-spirit art director, always fighting for more pages for her truly remarkable fashion photos, and always trying to subvert the fashion world's expectations. [On hearing that Wintour has ordered the pot belly of the film's cameraman -- who was used as minor subject in one of the magazine's approved photo shoots -- be airbrushed, Coddington quickly calls the art department for it to refrain from doing so. "We need this to be realistic," she tells the camera.] That push and pull between Wintour and Coddington is all the more interesting because it is not really antagonistic, but more of a strange kind of complementary. As Coddington would confess to the camera: "She knows how to push me, and I know how to push her." The film also has a special allure for me because it is also a story of journalism -- magazine-making is a very special niche -- and it has allowed me a sobering look into the hard work of creating those glossy pages. It informs me above all that the primary qualification of a good editor is really singular vision-keeping. I once worked for an editor who was too timid, and lacked a strong editorial voice: her way of managing her staff was to take in everyone's suggestions and ideas without really processing if they worked together. The resulting publication was a terrible hodgepodge that defied description. This film taught me the fine balance between editorial firmness and artistic flight. What's the film?
One fascinating thing about the art of Hersley Casero is his fascination for faces in miniature grouped together to create a kind of mass, a kind of shape, like this whale. Often he starts out his paintings by doing these faces on canvas, and then he paints over them with the final elements of the painting's images. For him it's a kind of ritual with almost magical connotations, the details of which I have promised not to reveal.
If there is a local visual artist that deserves fuller and more widespread recognition for the consistency he has exhibited in the name of the imaginative in the past decade, it should be Raz Salvarita—although sometimes it can be hard to pin down the singular artist, simply because he has done so much. He deserves bigger acclaim.
The Dumaguete-based painter who has familial roots in Bacolod has continued to beguile us with an assortment of passions, never an art dabbler, always laser-like in the reasons for his current pursuits—but Raz is all pluralities. He does experimental filmmaking, and has in fact been nominated for an Urian for his short film Patience, which infamously “chronicled” the languorous journey of a snail through a patch in a garden. [Recently, he is obsessed with the idea of filming Dumaguete geriatrics as they offer their memories of their youth.] He has done performance art, and in fact helped paved the way for the preservation of the forests around Lake Balinsasayao from possible encroachments by an energy company, by going around Dumaguete semi-naked, painted white from head to toe, bearing a sign that called dire attention to the environmental issue. Or photography, where he has always captured an uncanny but intimate feel of the environment—always being the gimlet-eyed naturalist. Or paintings, where his abstractions sometimes are a paean to his upcycling tendencies, but are often studies of the psyche in domestic mode, his paintings a portal to fantasies and nightmares.
It is of that latter preoccupation that delights us in his pop up exhibition, Midnight Talkers + Internal Monologues, now gracing the walls of Café Alima along Ipil Street [parallel to the Silliman Ballfield]—which, because it is a pop up—should be taken more as a promise for a larger collection deserving of full exhibition. Consisting of seven paintings, the exhibit is a kind of return to a previous style of painting he did more than a decade ago, away from the mandalas and circles and fiery vulvas of his Bali phase, and away from the found wood and textiles of his upcycling phase.
Midnight Talkers + Internal Monologues invites us to consider the playful and the playfully snide, its title immediately reminiscent of nocturnal talks with good friends which eventually embrace a healthy dose of the id expressing itself, knowing full well it is in good and forgiving company; or introspective musings done alone when the clock strikes the witching hour and we become proverbial “cats” inert in repose but always alert the subtle earthquakes of our ponderings and reveries.
I like how cats—or what look like cats—dominate many of the paintings of this series; as a cat person myself and a Leo to boot, I am fully aware of the significations of the feline: the mode, the mood, and the animal tendencies. Cats can also be monstrous, and the monstrous—existentially speaking—is what is at heart in Midnight Talkers + Internal Monologues.
In “Wake Up Call with Three Black Cats at 4 AM,” the titular cats make dreamlike havoc of the situation—but it goes beyond the surreal depiction of interrupted sleep to bring it closer to a kind of social commentary, as we see that the cats are somehow embodiments of what can keep us awake in the full horrors of the issues at stake. I will let the viewer tease out what those are, since they are so obvious they do not warrant mentioning.
But cats are not the only animalia represented in this series. Midnight Talkers + Internal Monologues is in fact a virtual menagerie of dreamlike, animal-adjacent creatures, most of them multiple-eyed, as if inviting us to think of these figures as “all-knowing” and “all-seeing,” our troubled psyches and dreamlike stances becoming zoos of all kinds of unfiltered feelings and raw emotions. But the exhibit also gives us an autobiographical invitation—via the captions here and there on the paintings giving us slivers of understanding the artist compelled to put on canvas these startling images.
There’s the pink monkey [or bear?] of “The Calm and the Elusive Dreamers Under the Bored Pink Sky,” doing a madonna-and-child repose whose eyes hint of a world-weariness, but as underscored by captions that read, “I dreamt like it’s 1983,” and also “I sleep talk like my five year old self,” we reconsider the significance of that smaller figure in the arms of the bigger figure—depictions of longed for innocence in childhood in the arms of ennui-filled adulthood.
There’s the multi-armed and double-eyed pig [or dog?] of “Dream is Over—Some Beginning’s End,” which carries over the previous painting’s sense of ennui. That boredom with the world, and with life, turns a more positive note in “Midnight Mystic Musing,” however; here, an owl embraces two frogs [or salamanders?] in the bluesiness of sleep, and tells us to “dream a little dream of me, and you,” like the song, which proves this series can be quite weirdly whimsical, too, despite its surreal and often devastating searches for meaning. It’s a whimsy though that is drenched in strong Dumaguete Tanduay-tagay, allowing the images to cross the gamut of excitation and exasperation.
This singular whimsy is embodied more fully in two paintings, again showcasing some kind of animals—a porcupine? a chicken? an octopus? a whale? a carabao? does it matter?—and again drenching them in surreal landscape, enlivened by captions that are snippets of every day expressions of vexations, such as in “Brain Critters on Graveyard Shift,” where one line of scrawled text cries, “Unsa na pud?” immediately followed by “Pastilan!” and “Samoka gud” and “… Utang na sad” and “Mantiaw” and “Nia na sad” and “Mao ba?” But in “Her Song Lingers, Usahay,” they become overtures of romantic expressions—in this case, snippets of lyrics from the famous Bisaya ballad.
I’m sure there is a bigger zoo in store containing more animals from Raz Salvarita’s surreal landscape, but as a glimpse of what’s to come, Midnight Talkers + Internal Monologues are appetizers. Paintings that are foregrounded as playful, but also somehow deeply thoughtful and subversive in their existential melancholy.
There are three things that have slowly become apparent as we live out the current days with their quotidian tremors that often signal—at least to those people who are sensitive to them—an unending arrival of apocalypse:
First, that Jean-Paul Sartre and Darren Aronofsky are right: hell is other people.
Second, that Hannah Arendt is right: the great cover of evil is banality.
And third, that Umberto Eco is right: a very good way to fight evil in the world is to persist in writing about it.
Evil is a curious thing. We tend to think of it as a dreadful embodiment of metaphysical darkness—a demonic possession, for example, or the bloody body count of serial killers, or the social havoc that is unleashed in the wake of psychopaths. In these instances, often graphically illustrated by the purveyors of our popular culture through movies and books, evil as a thing is banished to the realm of fantasy. It has become a malevolence that lurks mostly in the fringes of our imagination. We can be screening The Exorcist on our laptop screens, for example, cowering from its perfectly modulated jump scares—but we can just as easily turn the whole thing off, and then proceed to draw the curtains of our closed-off rooms, and suddenly the daylight of the “real” comes crashing in, saving us from a further sense of dread. Real evil, alas, is not so easily pigeonholed, and doesn’t usually come with bells and whistles.
What is often missing in the simplistic consideration of evil is the real thing that lurks in the human heart which, once in a while, jumps into abominable turns of history that allowed Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Marcos, and many of others of their ilk to happen.
Hitler impassioned many Germans—who were understandably feeling defeated by the ruinous end of the First World War—and he did so with his dreams of National Socialism. He triggered with it another great war, as well as the systematic elimination of “undesirable people” through a program we now call the Holocaust. (For Hitler, it was just called the “Final Solution.”)
Stalin built on the communist ideals of Lenin before him—but soon realized that a “revolution” ceased to be a revolution when it had no enemies to fight, and so he unleashed a never-ending search for “counter-revolutionaries” that ended up as several cycles of murderous purges in Russia, sparing no one.
Pol Pot dreamed of a return to a pure peasant society for Cambodia, and unleashed a program he called “Year Zero,” which soon systematically brutalized his people through years of making them toil in the so-called “killing fields.”
Mao dreamed of an empowered China and ushered in a plan he called “The Great Leap Forward,” a catastrophic program that led to 18 to 46 million dead Chinese—perhaps the greatest genocide in history.
Marcos dreamed of a “New Society,” and armed it to the teeth with martial rule.
What is often amazing to consider in these experiments in terror is that they were often carried out at the behest and in the name of those that these dictators ruled. “I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country,” Pol Pot once said. All the others felt the same way, too. In many cases, these despots often unleashed their worst tendencies with the approval of many. Hitler was beloved in Germany, and his policies—obviously wrong and evil in retrospect—resonated with the German masses. In their eyes, Nazism was a chance for Germany to become great again, and Hitler could do no wrong. Today, we ask a question that cannot be truly answered: how could so many be deceived? How could so many give tacit permission for atrocities to happen? And the answer may be this: human nature. Jean Renoir perfectly sums it up with this line in his film The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” Which makes Sartre right. Hell is other people—especially those people who have learned not to see anymore the moral imperatives of decent living.
I made this observation not too long ago: “When the bodies started piling up a few days ago in what appeared to be a growing rage for vigilantism, emboldened by a strongman’s battle cry for a war on drugs, the manner of the deaths and the manner of the disposal horrified me—as they should any right-minded human being. The anonymity of the hits. The crude fact of packaging tape sometimes covering the corpses, mummifying them in despairing positions. The cardboard signs that declare the dead a criminal—‘Pusher, ‘wag tularan,’ ‘Snatcher, ‘wag tularan,’ etc.—justifying the murder. Inside, I scream: ‘What happened to due process?’ These days those two words—bedrocks of a functioning democracy—are being laughed at. And I could not understand how people could shrug off the sinister implications.
“There has been a quiet acceptance by almost everyone of these things happening. And also waves of violent mocking by a mob if you issue dissent.
“It is not an entirely new thing. A sense of history would attest that these things have happened before, in exactly the same manner, give or take a culturally specific difference. I am going to use right now the most frightful of historical correlations. Because now I totally get what life was like for ordinary Germans in Nazi Germany, especially in the contentious pre-war decade. You see, seeing and reading about the horrors of World War II—in particular, the unbelievable death machine of the Holocaust—I used to ask myself: How come nobody did anything? Why were ordinary Germans so quiet, so passively (or aggressively) supportive of the programs of Hitler’s regime? Couldn’t a civilized people recognize a evil in their midst?”
That acceptance, that silence make evil the most ordinary thing in the world. All these murders have become so ordinary, we are not even moved by every new reportage anymore. We have learned to shrug away all these things, and we have even learned to make excuses for them. “Para sa bayan ‘to,” some of us have learned to say, without the slightest hint of irony—and thus Arendt is right: evil can become so banal.
Our ultimate hope lies in a suggestion Eco once proposed, especially for those facing a moral crisis in a society that is slowly embracing evil as a necessity: “To survive, we must tell stories.”
That was the imperative I went when I decided to put The Kill List Chronicles in June 2016, ostensibly to collect and archive the many literary works that started appearing, all of them protesting the new culture of impunity in the Philippines. In my introductory essay to that archive, I wrote: “Many Filipino writers…have slowly come out of the shadows of overwhelming public approval of the ongoing purge, to register dissent, to call for a process of justice that also respects human life and dignity, to strive for a country that recognizes that indeed crime must pay but this must be done in the only way that makes our democracy a functioning one. Anything else is a form of fascism.
“The rise of Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency, and his unorthodox methods of dealing with some of the country’s problems has currently inspired — if that is the right word at all — a few of our writers to take to the literary to express their grief and their horror, all in all registering a dissent that is still forming, that has yet to be studied. Some of the works take their cue from the bloody reports from television news and broadsheets. Some from the unexpected deaths — the new ‘collateral damage’ — of friends and people they know….
“This…is an attempt to archive the new literature of protest that is now beginning to be written. Only the future can tell how this literature, as a prospective tool for change, can impact what is going on at present. Protest literature are almost always considered only in the aftermath; perhaps this project can change that, and can demonstrate, once and for all, the power of literature as a social tool.”
One of the many writers who responded to that call was Carljoe Javier, who started to churn out little stories to document, in fiction, various scenarios, which would have been paranoid fantasies only a few months ago, but now have become painfully realistic.
Those stories together have become the first short story collection about the EJKs, a folio titled Cardboard Justice.
He started out with a poem titled “Cardboard Villanelle,” which rendered to playful lyricism the realization of growing horror at the status quo. Not satisfied with that, he turned to the essay—and produced “#PosiblengAdik,” a short rumination about the vicious randomness of the killings, where he makes this plea: that drug addicts and drug users—which are not the same things—must be seen as human who are capable of rehabilitation. He uses his own life as evidence of that, and writes: “We want to protect ourselves, protect our families. But every single time I see one of these people who are dead, I think, that could’ve been me. If I made different decisions in my life, I could have turned out that way. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to go to school, I can imagine being driven to do whatever it takes.”
That sentiment becomes the very theme that animates the short stories that quickly followed, each one suddenly pieces of a whole that gave us a sad geography of injustice.
“At the Door” shows us a young musician answering the frenetic knocks of raiding policemen, bent on arresting—or even killing—him, even though he has cleaned up his act for some time now. That doesn’t matter to the raiders. His name is on “the list,” and that was enough for police to harass him. That same dynamics—the fear of “the list”—puts the two characters of “On the List” in an existential crisis. Should they answer the summons or not? All the alternatives prove ultimately deadly.
“Past Buendia” follows a man on an innocent leisurely stroll in an old neighborhood—and gets mistaken for a pusher, and nearly dies because of that mistake.
“In the Street” underlines the innocence that has become compromised in the new culture of impunity: a group of young girls—a barkada—decide to have a food trip in Maginhawa Street in Quezon City, and they become witness to an actual extrajudicial killing. Their confrontation with the killer in the end marks the very end of their innocence—and signal a world that has gone absolutely upside-down. That blooms to paranoia, eventually—which becomes the focus of “At the Hood,” where a group of friends—formerly a rock band—consider attending the funeral of one of their members. But attendance at what cost? One of them demures—“It’s like those movies where people go to a funeral of a mob boss, and so there are cops all over taking picture of everyone go goes to the funeral. Then they use those photos to track down the people who went”—painting once and for all the compromises of a new age of paranoia.
“In an Uber” takes that paranoia and makes it the center point of conflict in what should be a normal social interaction between strangers: an Uber driver and his passenger. One approves of the killings, the other does not. Tension mounts.
And in “Nagda-drama Lang,” Javier chooses to occupy the consciousness of the bereaved—a woman cradling the dead body of her lover gunned down on the streets. It is inspired by a real life incident that became an iconic piece of photojournalism—a measure of grief that President Duterte later dismissed as “nagda-drama lang.” Which finally underlines the unemotional inhumanity behind all of these.
Why does Javier continue to write stories like this? They couldn’t possibly be a hoot to write; these sad stories only immerse us—the writer and the reader—in a flood of despair that seems, for the moment, unstoppable.
I think the answer is this: our anger has to be sustained, although that itself is an undertaking fraught with difficulty. How does one sustain anger? It is often easier to give up, and then to spout out such lines of “wisdom” like: “People deserve the politicians they vote for.” It is so much easier to surrender to the prevailing darkness—much like the Germans did at the height of Nazism, or Filipinos in the first five years of Martial Law. Protest and the literature that advocates it are not something that is embraced or favored by many people especially in the immediate aftermath of disastrous things. We are often told to “shut up”—and just embrace the status quo.
Nonetheless, we write.
In his recent visit to the Philippines, the Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa made it perfectly clear that reading and writing are subversive acts: “Dictators [and] dictatorships are right in being suspicious of this kind of activity, because I think this activity develops in societies a critical spirit about the world as it is,” he said.
And its effects are not in the immediately apparent; it is in the cumulative.
So Carljoe Javier and others like him write on, because we must survive. Because we must document and dramatize the unspeakable. Because the future demands it. Because when good finally triumphs over evil—as it always does—it needs to see where its seeds began, and it might as well begin in the stories we chose to tell today.
II.
What dark place Carljoe Javier had wrought Cardboard Justice from is something I am familiar with. I was invited to write for Rogue Magazine late last year: it was for a personal evaluation of the year that was—2016—and what had been, by and large, a tumultuous and ugly time. The spate of EJKs had exploded and divided the country, among other issues, exposing the unbelievable horror that people were actually capable for cheering for more blood.
I remembered F. Sionil Jose’s old reminder: “Art does not develop in a vacuum. The artist’s first responsibility is not just to his art, but to his society as well.” So in that Rogue article, I had posed the following sentiment, taking note of my responsibilities as a creative writer: “But when was being silent being part of the solution, ever, in history? And am in the wrong for calling for justice and for asking for equality? Should we stay quiet because the world has gone mad? Must the mob win? I ask myself: what is the role of the writer in times of crisis? Should I be spineless? When you live in horror, shouldn’t you fight the bogeyman?”
I haven’t been silent—and I have used what art I know to chronicle the nuances of these disturbing times. As I have previously mentioned, I put up a literary blog last year—I called it the Kill List Chronicles—which has become an attempt to archive the new literature of protest that is now beginning to be written. I wrote about it: “Only the future can tell how this literature, as a prospective tool for change, can impact what is going on at present. Protest literature is almost always considered only in the aftermath; perhaps this project can change that, and can demonstrate, once and for all, the power of literature as a social tool.”
Since then I have received, and archived, hundreds of poems, essays, short stories, and one-act plays that have tried to provide insight, or have struggled to define these bloody times—mostly from amateur writers, but also a significant number from some of the brightest names in Philippine literature, including Krip Yuson, Marne Kilates, Carljoe Javier, Luisa Igloria, Dean Francis Alfar, Daryll Delgado, Miguel Syjuco, Floy Quintos, and so many others.
I’ve written two horror stories for the effort, both articulating the horror of EJKs in a fantastical realm that finally didn’t seem so farfetch. And as we have seen, it has also led Carljoe to come out with what is perhaps the first short story collection about the EJKs, Cardboard Justice, and Miyako Izabel to come out with its poetry equivalent. When I judged the Palanca for the short story in English, two entries immediately stood out as gripping responses to the times—John Bengan’s “Disguise,” which won first prize, and Katrina Guiang Gomez’s “Misericordia,” which won second.
Let’s do a quick sampling of artistic responses to the national malaise. Nerisa del Carmen Guevara has done a performance piece titled “Elegy 5: Wake.” Jam Pascual has done spoken word poetry titled “Bloody Sunday.” Gary Granada has come up with a song titled “Pordbida!” Adolfo Alix Jr. has done a feature-length film titled Madilim Ang Gabi, and Bor Ocampo a short film titled, of course, “EJK.” Liza Magtoto has written a musical titled A Game of Trolls for PETA.
I am fascinated, however, with what visual artists have come up with to make sense of the madness—and we don’t have a lack of such artists coming up with works both subtle and visceral all over the country.
In Dumaguete, there’s Einstein Schwartz Gaspar Maulad whose miniature and morbid piece titled “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” does not mince intentions with its slap of the painfully ironic. It caused a bit of a stir when it was unveiled, together with the works of other Silliman Fine Arts students, last August. Here, what you basically get is a contraption that’s laid out as a kind of elongated balikbayan box, or perhaps a gift, accompanied by a label that recalls immediately the official tagline of Philippine tourism. Upon opening the box, you get a surprise: the shape of a dead body wrapped up in masking tape, bloody drips everywhere, bearing a sign that reads, “Drug pusher ako, wa’g tularan,” recalling instantly the EJKs we have come to breathe as the new reality of this carnage republic.
It’s not a subtle piece, nor is it meant to be. This is what accounts for its greatness: the forcefulness of its message that straddles the border of irony and sincerity—which is perhaps the best response to the murderous chaos this postmodern world has come to be.
And then there’s Nicky de la Peña whose Predicaments exhibit only last February continues to haunt me. I cannot stop thinking of the works in that exhibit, how appropriate they are material-wise, how uncannily conceived to be both a reflection of the headlines and as a shock to our complacencies. How simple they are in the final analysis, but also how fraught with undeniable power.
Each work—a painting? a sketch?—is set on cardboard pieces of several varieties. There’s a pizza box, for example. (“The choice of materials is vital [because …] carton boxes [have been] used for the well-known ‘adik ako, huwag tularan’ signs [we have seen],” Mr. de la Peña explains.) And on each haphazard piece, upon the uneven brown surface of the unlikely canvas, we see bodies drawn in various states of black-and-white deadness—the faces all unseen, all becoming inconvenient ghosts most people today are removed from and do not think as an affront to the freedom they are enjoying.
The works ask you: do these anonymous bodies deserve their fate? Why?
Mr. de la Peña writes in his artistic statement of his inspiration and his process: “The issue of textrajudicial killings in the Philippines has attracted international concerns. Some countries strongly criticize the current administration while some have [given] solid support, especially from the East and South-east Asian region. Opinions [are] divided into right or wrong, between justifiable actions and pure immorality. This division of perspectives is the issue [that] my works depict.”
But to add to the hauntedness of his pieces, he used his own body as the subject of the reenactments of the various crime scene. According to him, it raises questions about what is right or wrong, or framed up or guilty, or what exactly accounts for just another collateral casualty.
He continues: “Those people who don’t know me are more likely to justify the death, for they have no background of [who I am]. [My family and friends who do know me, however, will seek query.] These questions are important to me because people nowadays are quick to place judgment with inadequate comprehension of the situation, [often] turning a blind eye to justify their own opinion. With the current crisis involving the Philippine National Police…, these questions need to sink into the [minds] of every Filipino now more than ever.”
His art, like most protest art now being produced in the Age of Duterte, provokes us with this question: to what extent can you dehumanize someone to accept their murders as something completely deserved?
Can the news headlines remain impersonal to us? Can we remain unmoved?
It reminds of this passage from Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, where a society so much like ours slowly finds itself descending into misogynist dystopia:
“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
The art we do now in the name of protest is to negate those “blank white spaces at the edges of print,” and “the gaps between the stories.”
They are meant to disturb, to make people think. They are finally meant to move.
3:54 PM |
More Playtime with Clay!
