The Spy in the Sandwich

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

3:27 PM | Atoa Gihapon

For the love of all that’s good and beautiful, if you’re in Dumaguete before the 26th of November, you must find the time to visit MUGNA Gallery over in Valencia town—because displayed on its walls right now is an extraordinarily curated group exhibition, executed by Ixx as part of the festivities around the recently concluded Buglasan Festival, which gives a precise overview of the state of Dumaguete fine arts at the moment, in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, and on the cusp of a future that’s filled with promise.

There is an uncommon sense of culmination to be felt in the whole of KaMugnaAn, which groups together 38 visual artists who call Negros Oriental their home. What I mean by this is that this show feels very much like a continuation—and also a grand elevation—of that pandemic project titled Atoa. If you remember, that was a group exhibit that opened early in 2021 at Dakong Balay Gallery, and provided the artists of Dumaguete an inciting trigger which made possible the great flowering of visual arts in the city in the midst of the pandemic. Atoa initiated a continuous flow of exhibitions throughout the rest of the pandemic years, and in the various galleries that popped up during that strange and confounding time—including a sequel, Atoa 2, which bowed in 2022. For that initial show, I wrote for the Philippine Daily Inquirer: “[The exhibit shows] a collective ‘atoa,’ and with that, a sense of community pride. They herald an excitement for what’s brewing in the local art world. They signify cultural light in our current darkness—Dumaguete still at it for … its local celebration of [the arts]. They defy hoary, outside formulations—showing us that Dumaguete artists are at once gloriously local but also very much at home in the world.”

If Atoa staked a claim, KaMugnaAn is the final flag that marks distinct territory.

Because what is gathered here are works that represent most of its artists with the distinct styles they’ve found for themselves since 2021. And because the show also introduces us to new Dumaguete artists coming into the fold, as well as older artists now finding their way back home. And finally because, despite the disparity of subjects and styles, Ixx found an uncanny way to connect them all—with the show itself becoming a narrative of the Negros Oriental experience, a necessary prescription for the provincial festival it was meant to showcase.

Step into MUGNA’s space, and you will find a virtual yearbook of the exhibits that have come to being in the past three years. Babbu Wenceslao’s “Anino ang Anino sa Adlaw” is a reflection of his Republic and Asanamo exhibits, with its attendant attention to acrylic, LED lights, and fiberglass mixed media, and his unvarying focus on social issues; Amelia Duwenhoeger’s “Rabbits” is taken from Dual/Ities, where she showed a penchant for mice and rabbits frolicking about in familiar human shenanigans; Daniel Vincent’s “Wars and Missiles” is a continuation of a translucent project in abstraction he first showcased in Diverse/Reverse; Faye Manalo’s “Lost and Found” is a darker take to her ripple-and-line art that glowed with brighter sheen in Ripples and Introspection; Hemrod Duran’s “King” continues his feel for representational clay art from New Works, this time with an eye on chess pieces [you can see a fuller display of this current tendency in a limited exhibition at the National Museum of the Philippines in Dumaguete]; Iris Tirambulo’s “Halaran” continues her textile/insect explorations about domesticity and motherhood from Halad; Jana Jumalon’s “Passage” finds her making new terracotta shapes straight from Tierra Quemada; Jomir Tabudlong’s “1450-2023” defines more spectral colors interlaced with found images from Pieces Align; Juan Macias’s “Determinism” continues his somber collage works from Sonder.

Jude Millares’ “Hand-Over” goes for even starker pagan shapes and motifs he first plumbed in Journals; Moshi Dokyo’s “Sag Asa” mercifully pushes his comic depressed art persona from ProQuackStinate into a more hopeful composition; Mikoo Cataylo’s “Dire Ta,” with its painful rendition of a limbless man in chains, continues the provocative assault on social issues we first glimpsed from Pakigbisog sa Kailaloman; Alta Jia’s “The Future is Not Ours to See” is another of the artist’s exquisitely rendered pen-and-ink probing into psychological vistas we have seen from all the group shows she appeared in, most especially Manifest; Kitty Taniguchi’s “Untitled [A Study for the Series, The Vicinity]” continues her endless fascination for mythic winged horses and black crows, this one stained by a red sun; Dolly Sordilla’s “Playdate with Poppy” gives us more whimsical polymer figures in shiny acrylic colors straight out from Ambot Gubot; Rey Labarento’s “Owhi Really?!” pursues the same thread-outlined social scenes he pioneered in At the Moment; Trina Montenegro’s “Mystery Plant” takes off from the aboriginal-tinged botanical macroviews of Windows of Perception; Viviana Riccelli’s “The Angel of Mount Talinis” plumbs deeper into transcendental abstraction we first caught in States of Mind: A Dialogue Between the Inner Self and Multiple Realities, and Jutsze Pamate’s “Flex” continues his sculptural work commenting on modern realities, using a Pinocchio head, from KomBaTe.

All of these are exhibits from the last three years or so. But Hersley-Ven Casero extends it even further: in “ginhawa [breathe,” he takes an illustration he made for a children’s story from my 2012 short story collection, Heartbreak and Magic, which we exhibited in his first solo show, Uncommon Magic, and updates that image of a boy with magical things swirling around him into this self-portrait—a photographer with a camera in tow, eating a bananacue while inspiration swirls around him in rainbow colors, which is the closest Mr. Casero has ever confessed, on canvas, on how the magical has truly informed his art-making.

This is all to say that if you missed following the sheer development of Dumaguete art in recent years, KaMugnaAn is your most welcome crash course.

The show also showcases the art of familiar artists who really need their own solo shows soon—Mariana Varela, for example, whose “Sigbin” exhibits teeth that sink deeper into her mythology of being she has explored before; or Kevin Cornelia, whose “Padayon” is perhaps my favorite in this crop of works—a black and white portrait of a laughing young man paradoxically intertwined by flying paper planes and gumamela blooms whose leaves encasing the body are not distinguishable from thorns; or Portia Nemeño, whose “Sugilanon” borrows the style of art nouveau in this painterly rendering of local mythology; or Gerabelle Rae, whose “The Dreaming of Escape” is a surreal wish fulfilment of childlike wonder; or Dyn Quilnet, whose “Embrace II” is a mixed media evocation of misshapen maternal nightmares. There’s also Rovan Caballes, who takes off from Warholian prints to present an acrylic portrait of his grandmother Ines Serion, the first female mayor elected in the Philippines.

All told, I am happiest for Jutsze Pamate, who was the face of Dumaguete visual arts in the 1990s and 2000s, and who has come back to the scene quite unexpectedly, first with a pop up at the El Amigo Art Space a few months ago, and now with this inclusion in KaMugnaAn. This for me is part of the appeal of the exhibition—that while it celebrates the vibrant art of the current crop of young artists in Dumaguete and Negros Oriental, it also makes accommodation for those who have come before. I can hope for the inclusion of other artists like Mariyah Taniguchi or Paul Pfeiffer or Kristoffer Ardena or Susan Canoy or Cornelio Aro [the last two would be a great addition to the show with the theme of “Negros Oriental”], or even Karl Aguila and Bong Callao—but 38 artists are already quite a handful.

The show also introduces us to the works of a handful of artists whose works I want to see more of. This includes Budoy Marabiles, whom we all know as an EDM master and front man for Original Sigbin, whose “Santelmo”is a Rorschach ink blot test of what could be monstrous; photographer Carmen Del Prado, whose “Piggy Bank” is a veritable diptych of a beach scene from the same day but at different times and moods—demonstrating the fleeting quality of the world we inhabit; Jenny Alvarez, whose “Metanoia,” awash in pink hues, playfully divert us from the subtle threat of her main image—a pair of hands in the process of scissoring a flimsy pink thread; Koki, whose “Ghosting [Talinis]” is a work of unglazed porcelain that mimics the unfurling of a white and ghostly sheet, but presents itself as a metaphor for Dumaguete’s nearby mountain; and Marjo Banagua, whose “Dumagit [Captivate}” captures in sepia tones in acrylic and line art the basic allure of Dumaguete, with the campanario as its focal point. [Other artists featured in the exhibition include Samnathis, Sandy Dupio, Ma. Isabel Gutang, Jo Camille, Florenz Dionisio, Dani Sollesta, and Dan Dvran.]

As far as I know, these works were prompted by the Buglasan Festival’s theme of “Garbo sa Kabisay-an,” in essence a celebration of Oriental Negrense scenes—and perhaps cares. You could see efforts in that respect, in particular the works of Sandy Dupio, Carmen Del Prado, Viviana Riccelli, and Gerabelle Rae [portraying natural landscape], Portia Nemeño [portraying literature], Marjo Banagua [portraying iconic spots], Mariana Varela and Budoy Marabiles [portraying lower mythology], and Rovan Caballes [portraying history]—but the theme has been thoroughly processed by each of their artistic sensibilities, while the rest of the works in the exhibition, I believe, present to us the Negros Oriental of their imagination, both in delight and deprecation, in pleasure and in pain. That duality is important, and the fact that this exhibit acknowledges that is to its credit.

Curator Ixx does recognize the disparity in styles—but sees common grounds in terms of depictions of places and people, finding in each one a unique element of the Negrense. He notes in his program for the show: “Putting together an exhibition to highlight the wealth and number of different styles, techniques, and personalities of a locale is always a herculean task, as the push and pull, the width and breadth of experience and paradigm manifest in countless ways. Overcoming this, Mugna Gallery, in celebration of the Province of Negros Oriental’s Buglasan Festival [in] 2023, presents an exhibition that gathers local artists and ties them along the string that is the Dumaguete creative spirit—a KAMUGNAAN like nothing else.”

We will take him at his word: this is a celebration of a communal creative spirit.

KaMugnaAn runs until November 26 at MUGNA Gallery, Unit 1 Uypitcing Building, Jose V. Romero Road, Bong-ao, Valencia.

Labels: art, art and culture, buglasan, dumaguete, negros, painting, sculpture

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Tuesday, January 12, 2021

7:40 PM | Rock as Metaphor

The point of art, so it is sometimes said, is to render the mundane into the level of the extraordinary and consequently lift it to higher, perhaps loftier, consideration. There, wrung out of its usual ordinariness, an object can often be used as vessel for self-expression, or as statement, or as reflection of some profound “truths” about life, about existence, about meaning.

The formalists call this process “estrangement.” In literature, where it is often used, scenes of ordinary reality is depicted, through words, in a stylistic manner that gives the reader an extra layer of interpretation that goes beyond the literal and into the metaphorical. At the ending of James Joyce’s iconic short story “The Dead,” the husband listens to his wife’s tearful, memory-filled descent into slumber while he looks out the window of their room, seeing snow falling everywhere—yet this is no ordinary sight of snow: in Joyce’s pen, it is a distillation of anguished knowing that we cannot really know the deepest truths about the people we love.

Then there’s Marcel Duchamp who, in 1917, presented for exhibition an ordinary urinal, and titled it “Fountain”—igniting controversy, and sparking an ongoing debate about what makes art. The artist Beatrice Wood, perhaps recognizing the innovative, inventive, and disruptive power of the work, wrote in the aftermath of the exhibition: “He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—[and] created a new thought for that object.”

This, for me, has always been part of what interests me about art—to see the artists’ subjects in the canvas or lens or mold of their subjectivities, and inquire of myself what provokes me of their specific ways of seeing, what reaches of metaphor [or, in Wood’s formulation, “new thought”] they are trying to go for.

The subject of Hersley Casero’s Organic Magic, an exhibit currently running at the new Dakong Balay Gallery along the Rizal Boulevard, certainly invites this kind of scrutiny. It is, after all, concerned with various depictions of one of the commonest things we have in this world: the rock—which is ubiquitous, and does not readily demand from us closer scrutiny, much less as agent of artistic expression.

(And yet this view might be one of contemporary failing. Because art history would tell us that rocks [and surfaces of rocks] have been there since prehistory, with early men shedding light on the daily life in the distant past through pictographs, petroglyphs, engravings, petroforms [rocks laid out in patterns], and geoglyphs [or ground drawings]. Today, there’s also land art occasionally using stones and rocks to render landscapes in new light.)

The seed of Casero’s exhibit sprang from his recent art residency at Warnecke Ranch and Vineyards on Chalk Hill in Healdsburg, California—a property in the Alexander Valley that hosts, partly, the Russian River. The meandering flow of the river leaves in its path what locals call “wishing rocks,” which are rocks with a single perfectly unbroken strip of quartz all the way around the circumference—with no splits, no out-runners, no faint second lines on them, to make them “true” wishing rocks. According to Jim Brace-Thompson of Rock and Gem, lore has it that “if you trace your finger around the line while closing your eyes and making a wish, and then throw the stone into the sea as far as you can [or, barring that, give it to another person], your wish will come true.”

This link with magic, wishing or otherwise, is the key to Mr. Casero’s immediate inspiration for the exhibit, based on what I have come to understand about his art. [Full disclosure: I curated his first solo exhibit, Uncommon Ordinary Magic, in 2011.] He has always been keen—because of very interesting family history that stretches back to magic-filled Camiguin past—on rocks and stones imbued with the supernatural. The title of the current exhibit alone cues us in.

Returning to the Philippines from that California sojourn, he began to seek out local rocks and minerals, now more attuned to their allure and to their magical promise. What resulted from this is a collection splintered into three modes of expression—ceramics, graphite on paper and canvas, and oil on canvas—that hint of the artist finding ways to express the rock in his specific metaphor for the world we live in.

The works in graphite on acid-free paper—collectively known as the “On the Rocks” series—feel like the artist in the initial phase of this “rocky” exploration. They have Casero deep in what you might call “rock portraiture,” delving into the very literal. The framed works, painstaking renderings of individual rocks in glorious black etchings, have their subjects seemingly afloat in the midst of negative white space, giving them personality, their realistic representational nature obliquely giving them a sense of the magical: they’re almost like icons behind the glass, demanding scrutiny, even worship.

In his sculptural, ceramic works, Casero goes into simile: most of the pieces are untitled, but you cannot mistake their identification—they’re shaped like ordinary rocks, like corals, like stones, but in sometimes giving them color, Casero also insists on other similes: “This one is not just like a rock, it is also like a sea cucumber or like a pigeon.”

And finally, in his works on canvas, Casero takes the rock, or the organic, into deep metaphor. The most commanding work in the space—simply for its size and for how its mounted—is his work in oil on canvas titled “Heart of Gold.” What’s portrayed is the bare human heart in all its muscular texture, floating above a somber sea—but a closer look gives us a human being embedded in its design, and an even closer look—this time in the context of the overall exhibit, is that the heart, by shape, also looks like a rock. Here, and following the rest, Casero limns on the magical connectivity of all these things in our natural world, asking us to pay closer attention to the organic connection we all share, which is the biggest magic of all.

The exhibit subscribes to that ecological reading. Its statement ends with this: “For thousands of years we worshipped, respected, and revered the natural world. But our modern, technological lifestyles have created a false sense of dominion over the Earth we inhabit. We endeavor to control and construct our surroundings in order to meet our desires, when in fact it is our environment, which weathers, carves, and polishes our hearts… All organic matter that exists on Earth today is made of ancient stardust and contains the whole universe within it. Us, the Earth, even the little rocks we tread into the ground beneath our feet. Ultimately, we are all made up of nothing short of ‘organic magic.’”

The exhibit statement also calls to mind how 2020 should make “rethink what is really important to us, and to rekindle a sense of awe and gratitude for the little mundane things we are already abundant in, in their many forms and facets.” Which brings me to my favorite piece in the exhibition:

In “It’s Been a Hard Year, But We Made It...,” a work in acrylic and graphite on canvas, Casero gives us a 2020 calendar, spaces marked out for all the months in Binisaya—but instead of dates in grids, we get pictures of rocks, their texture rendering literal hardness and metaphorical hardship. But they are also symbols of resoluteness, and gateways to wishes and magic—enough comfort for our hard times.

The exhibit is presented by Pinspired.ph and Dakong Balay, and runs until the end of January, 2021.

Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, painting, sculpture

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Tuesday, February 28, 2017

2:05 PM | A Second Year of 'Dagit' Art

There is always a vision of Dumaguete as an artists’ haven. In the best of times — when everyone’s artistic energy is in sync with each other and the circumstances are conducive — it strikes us as the most ordinary, the most beautiful truth about the city. You go around and you see the musicians doing their thing, the writers doing their thing, the theatre artists doing their thing, the dancers doing their thing, the visual artists doing their thing, the filmmakers doing their thing — and when these disparate, colourful things collide or collude, the result is often a startling beauty that makes you go, “Of course we can do that. This is Dumaguete, after all. An artists’ haven.”

I’ve seen that beautiful synthesis happen many times in Dumaguete over the years, but for now, in the interest of this space, my best example would have to be the local theatrical triumph of Scharon Mani, a small but resounding musical that dared tell the lives of ordinary Dumaguetenos. But more than that, the production skilfully weaved together the artistic threads of various disciplines that thrive locally — the theatricality of the Youth Advocates Through Theatre Arts or YATTA combined with the musicality of the Belltower Project, and infused with the visual feast of a production design by Aziza Daksla, the smart and knowing script by playwright Junsly Kitay, and the moves of choreographer Nikki Cimafranca.

In the worst of times though you can feel lonely as an artist in Dumaguete. In barren moments, you ask yourself, where are the galleries, the street art? The happenings? The film productions? The concerts? The organizations? They are there, of course, if you know where to look — but a common blindness still characterize us as artists in a community. When we finally formed the 6200 Film Society, a network of local filmmakers, one of the things we realized we needed solving was the fact that, despite our love for local filmmaking, we didn’t even get to see, or know of, each others' works.

And the community as a whole is still largely an inchoate one that is saddled with old grudges, stifling disappointments, and hidden agendas — all understandable, all part and parcel to the dynamics of any group, especially artistic ones with incurably sensitive souls. Artists are still humans, after all. We are still getting there, to that vision of a Dumaguete art community that hums and sparkles and works, and we will get there, somehow, soon.

One such miracle of communal undertaking is the Dagit Arts Fest. And today is the last day to catch the best and the most startling art made by local visual artists in Dumaguete. The DAGIT ARTS FEST opened last February 25, in the final flourish to end National Arts Month — or Kisaw 2017, as we call it in Dumaguete. Sponsored by the Provincial Office of the Department of Trade and Industry and coordinated by Gugma Gaia's Raz Salvarita, this is the second year of exhibition of local arts and crafts.

To go to Robinson’s Place to see all these artists and their works gathered together under the festival’s theme of “Istorya Isla” is to see them in their vision of place, in their phase of artistic growth, in their hopefulness that Dumaguete is at heart a haven that nurtures them.

I love several of the works by artists I already know… Danni Sollesta’s “Body Poetry,” a sculptural work in terra cotta, is a delightful and witty Botero-esque piece that somehow awes and terrifies all at once. Irma Lacorte’s “Untitled,” with its circular frame and pen-and-ink finish is a melancholy meditation set in jagged natural geometry. Rianne Salvarita’s “Gaia” is a bold take on an environmental theme that strikes one as being both traditional and groundbreaking at the same time. Babbu Wenceslao’s “Habal-Habal” is a joyful depiction, in terra cotta, of a regular transportation scene — and proves art’s biggest theme: to pull the ordinary into a beautiful defamiliarization. Glory Abueva-Tobias’ expressionistic “Embrace” is a riot of colors and shapes, depicting hazy human figures in that titular act, that is both warm and disorienting. But Jana Jumalon-Alano’s sculptural piece, a gigantic papier-mâché ziggurat of personal mementos, is probably the most breathtaking and towering, literally and metaphorically: it is a piece that intimidates with its size but is also conducive to inviting the casual passersby in examining its intricate nooks and crannies — the small windows scattered here and there, the significance of all the pictures embedded here and there…

The exhibit also boasts of other artists I have yet to hear more about — and already their works show much promise: the tight representational works of Audie Estrellada and Hope Estrellada, the spare minimalism of Epefanio Mate and Heun Yang, the moodiness of Ken Concepcion, the witty and graphic beauty of Tenet Vanguardia and Grape-Ninja, the whimsy of Wilson John Abiera.

The Dagit Arts Fest feels very much like the start of that community of local visual artists we’ve been waiting for to happen for years now. And it seems to be the seed of an even more considerable anthology of art that is uniquely Dumaguete in the years to come. Mr. Salvarita and all the other artists deserve congratulations for pulling this off the second time around. Our expectations for the next editions are even higher now — and deservingly so.

Labels: art and culture, artists, dumaguete, painting, sculpture

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Sunday, October 04, 2015

7:48 AM | The Trust of Public Spaces

I was reading this fascinating article in The Atlantic Monthly where writer Selena Hoy muses over a cultural observation: that Japanese kids—often as young as six years old—are such a common sight on Japanese mass transit, and posits that “even in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves, [and the] reason has a lot to do with group dynamics.”

Hoy continues: “It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats. They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as 6 or 7, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight. A popular television show called Hajimete no Otsukai, or My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years.”

I think this still bears some resemblance to small town life in the Philippines. I can still remember my own childhood in Dumaguete where I was sent to do various errands (mostly having to do with buying stuff from the local sari-sari store) by my parents and a whole barracks full of elder brothers—five of them, in fact. But I think it is a slowly disappearing part of family culture among Filipinos, with our increasing urbanization and the plethora of maids we have around to do our bidding.

I think of the bigger cities we have in the Philippines, something comparable to Tokyo, and I admit to a kind of unease. Because to be honest, I’ve always felt safer in Tokyo in a way I can never feel safe in Manila, for example. I’ve lived in Tokyo in my early 20s and this barest fact about life in that Japanese city has always been apparent to me. Even with the problem of language (and the fact that Tokyo is a megalopolis), I know I can go from point A to point B without too much trouble. In Manila, even when I take a taxi, my guard is up, waaaay up, it is quite stressful—and I can only conclude with this question: Will I ever feel safe navigating around my own country’s capital? The answer seems to be, given the realities. What’s up with that?

Hoy explains why the opposite seems to be the fact of life in Japan: “Taking responsibility for shared spaces means that [Japanese] children have pride of ownership and understand in a concrete way the consequences of making a mess, since they’ll have to clean it up themselves. This ethic extends to public space more broadly (one reason Japanese streets are generally so clean). A child out in public knows he can rely on the group to help in an emergency.”

Perhaps that’s what’s lacking with Filipinos in the Philippines [and I make that as a clear distinction, because we’re totally different creatures abroad]: we don’t take responsibility for our shared public spaces. And there are many instances of this neglect.

We use our sidewalks as garbage bins. (There are no actual garbage bins, for one thing.) We don’t make it a point to keep to the right in public escalators, to give space for those who may be in a hurry. We barely line up for anything, preferring to cluster around and using palakasan as key to facilitate things. We leave the tables in the restaurants we frequent with remains of meals that resemble a sty. We snarl our traffic with devil-may-care driving selfishness. And we make excuses for these by justifying to ourselves that others are not following rules—so why should we?

There are even bigger instances of our misuse of public spaces. We build ugly infrastructure and buildings without any thought to whether the immediate community needs it. (That overpass near Silliman High School is a glaring example). Or whether it blends well with the environment. (That strange rectangular contraption cum billboard along the Rizal Boulevard near the tempurahan which is apparently meant to invite the framing of photos of passing tourists—as if it’s a perfectly good idea for anyone to want to do that). We also consistently elect public officials who sleepwalk over issues of the public good (like public transit).

And lastly, we treat our public parks and monuments like afterthoughts. We have been luckier in this respect in Dumaguete—but elsewhere, it has been a glaring problem. The artist Paulo Alcarazen once posted on Facebook a series of photos of the monument along Roxas Boulevard in Manila dedicated to our OFWs. Each photo in a set of three was taken within a few years of each other. Taken all at once, the series presents a sad study in devolution and heartbreak: the monument over time becomes surrounded by suspicious development, with the greenery that initially surrounded it over time becoming an ugly sea of concrete. And the statues comprising the monument themselves have become compromised. The original monument consisted of five figures in bronze—a mother, an elder daughter, a younger son, and their dog in a gesture of excited welcome to a returning OFW father. But over the years, some of the figures have totally disappeared (perhaps shanghaied by bakal boys), and what has remained of the monument now is just the figures of the mother and the daughter, both sans limbs.

There is a famous explication about public safety that is popularly called the “broken windows theory.” It is a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signaling effect of urban disorder and vandalism as markers for crime and anti-social behavior. In that theory, a hypothetical community where the buildings have perpetually neglected broken windows is said to invite a rise in criminality and anti-social behavior in that community.

And we have so many “broken windows” in Dumaguete.

The trash on our streets.

The chaos of our traffic.

The devaluation of our public parks.

The uneven sidewalks running along our city streets.

And we keep complaining why our city is no longer the “city of gentle people” of yore? Why there are unsolved killings in our midst? Why our youths turn to drugs? Why there is a pervasive lack of public love for our local heritage?

Responsibility for public spaces and public safety. Everything connects.

Labels: art and culture, cleanliness, culture, issues, life, magazines, manila, public safety, sculpture, tokyo, urban planning

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Monday, July 13, 2015

11:49 AM | The Most Beloved Filipino Gardener in San Francisco

By Wilfredo Pascual
GUEST BLOGGER

Yesterday Jack and I spent the entire afternoon in the wildest, most enchanting garden in the city. Not too many people know about this whimsical wonderland that often gets listed among the city's top hidden gems. This precious secret is tucked in a residential neighborhood between Interstate 280 and the elevated BART tracks.

In the garden we saw an elephant, a tiger, giant lizards and other strange creatures hidden in a carpet of wild flowers. We climbed hidden trails and saw a red-faced giant reading the book of knowledge under a tree, mermaids and acrobats amidst blazing trumpet vines and white lilies. If you look closer, you'll see hundreds of faces along the trails and on tree trunks overgrown with vines. There are towers, Native American totem poles, a tribute to 9/11, and a man riding a bicycle in midair. I heard others saw John Lennon and Herb Caen in the garden. I believe I saw Jose Rizal, the Philippines' national hero and a Filipina wearing a terno.

This was the work of an immigrant, Mang Demi. He said he wanted to make something beautiful out of darkness. He felt that it was his duty. He learned how to garden back home and took a few art classes when he took industrial art courses. Mang Demi was once asked about the sculptures. “These are not mine," he said. "Whatever this creative ability it is that has been given to me, it’s not mine to claim for myself, but to use for the good of all.”

Born in the Philippines, Demetrio Bracero arrived in the United States in the seventies. In 1986, he got hired as a gardener for the city and was assigned to clean up a park. When Demi first arrived in the area assigned to him, there was a lot of gang and criminal activity in the park. Little by little, the old man singlehandedly cleaned up the place. One day after a storm, he saw a fallen log and decided to carve it. He continued tending the garden and every time he would see a fallen log he would carve a sculpture and leave it there. He did this for twenty years until he retired in 2008. And then the garden fell into neglect.

Last year, when the park reopened after renovations that cost 9 million dollars, they found a total of 376 sculptures hidden in the park. The neighborhood and city agencies decided to preserve Demetrio Bacero's work.

These are some of the pictures I took.