a modest exhibit by Liongoren Gallery paid tribute to Rizal and Co by honoring

eight male environmentalists whose contributions were interpreted through

paintings and installations done by eight women artists, as part of an annual series
of exhibitions entitled Walong Filipina.
What was also notable about this exhibit was the contribution of students
from an Art Studies class in UP Diliman, who were assigned to research and write
about the pairs. Aliana Grace Gimena, who was assigned to the team of a policeman
and the artist Goldie Poblador, approached the subject in this manner:

Simple Words and Simple Deeds: No to Plastic

Traumatic. Alarming. These are words that come to mind whenever
we recall Ondoy, and the floods made more catastrophic because of
drainages clogged by plastic. It is a catastrophe which spurred Senior
Superintendent Romeo Magsalos, former PNP Chief of Police of Marikina,
to act. He initiated and strictly implemented the “Zero Plastic Bag and
Styrofoam Campaign” at the Marikina City Police Station. Policemen and
women transform newspapers into paper bag trash cans. When going
to market, they bring with them reusable bags or a bayong or basket.
Chief Magsalos’example showed that it is possible for government
employees to exercise political will and set an example.
Goldie Poblador interprets this example by setting up an installation
made up of 12 jars of waste and 12 jars of flora collected from the environs
of Marikina. A graduate of the UP College of Fine Arts, Poblador’s body
of works is built on collecting and ephemerality. In her early works, she
collected scents; and then she moved on to making and collecting jars.
In this work, she collects waste, a representation of the garbage we
amass; the ephemeral flora collection, which went through the process
of deterioration during the exhibit run, reminds us of the inevitability of
decomposition. But on the other hand, the ephemerality of the flowers,
and the fragility of the glass jars, also remind us that the ecosystem
is fragile, and is in fact, steadily weakening amidst our wasteful and
indiscriminate ways.
Here, artist and honoree embolden us to become vigilant eco-
vanguards, mindful of the ways by which catastrophes like Ondoy can
be minimized by simple words and simple deeds that simply say: “No to
Plastic.” (https://walongfilipina.wordpress.com/articles/)
In this and other passages in the blog, we can see an example of a project
that combined artworks, art criticism, education, and curation. These elements
were integrated in order to surface the themes of environmentalism and heroism
by honoring heroes past and present.

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Spirituality, Ecology, and Everyday Life
Rizal’s monuments, with its many variations, are often placed at the center
of the town plaza, a configuration inherited from Spanish colonizers, as we have
learned from previous lessons. At the town plaza center are the Church, the
municipal building, and the houses of elites. The Church usually has a kumbento or
convent, generally housing a school, the parish priest’s quarters and the office.
In the sleepy town of Mahatao in Batan Island, a municipality that is 99%
Roman Catholic, the 19th century built San Carlos Church is a heritage site, a
multi-purpose place, and a physical hub that has played a key role in protecting
the various historic structures and objects of the place. The kumbento, which
leads to the office and quarters of the parish priest, is also a meeting place for local
organizations, and because it has doorways that cut across the church, it is also a
corridor and passageway to a shortcut. It is dark, barren, and empty at times, filled
with people on the way to somewhere else at other times, or occasionally engaging
with each other, and perhaps for others with a meditative bent, the space could
serve as a transit point, where tired minds and hearts can rest and reflect.
Drawing on and inspired by this character of the heritage site, the artist Jay
Ticar constructed an archive composed of blank books arrayed on shelves that
mimic the waves of the sea, and other objects that resonate with the surrounding
environs. Passersby and users of the kumbento-turned-library can pick one of these
books at random, on which they can record their thoughts and feelings through
texts, drawings and actual objects. The simple gesture or mark in the pages of
the books gather like dust on furniture left passive and unused for a long time.
The artist hopes that the library gathers as much dust as possible, and becomes
in the long term, a “meaningful collection of dust,” as he puts it in his concept
paper for a collaborative project of Asian Public Intellectuals (API) in 2009/2010. As
part of the group who went to Batanes, one of the sites of the Asia-wide research
involving the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, Ticar proposed
this installation in response to the theme “Community-Based Initiatives Towards
Ecological Balance.”
Aside from the blank books, Ticar brought two boats into the library. One
of the boats was an abandoned tataya, the traditional wind-powered boat once
owned by a fishers association. What was once a central livelihood object that still
figures in traditional rituals and fishing practices became a nest for poultry and
object of curiosity when it was abandoned. Another boat, a larger one, which I
presume to have been motorized, is a symbol of modernity’s challenge to tradition.
Before it became a found object in Ticar’s installation, it once belonged to a farmer/
butcher/policeman and jail warden who has under his custody fishermen-poachers
from Taiwan and Vietnam. These boats, as the artist describes his project, “turned
into the tables and chairs of the library. Bamboo poles (articulated like a fishing
rod), carrying recycled floater turned light-bulb housing illuminate the boats. Still
on the floor area, stones from the valugan or aplaya as we term it in Tagalog, or
simply beach in English, boulders are used as stools. Hidden planks with wheels
are installed under these stones in an attempt to have a floating feel particularly if
they are being moved. These stones and boats are welcome to be rearranged and
played with.”

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 Built with the cooperation of the local government, this “illuminated archive
of dust,” (Ticar’s working title) serves as a multi-sensory and multi-gestural bearer of
non-official micro-narratives of loss and leavings, as well as gains and triumphs that
resonate and ripple across waters. Boats, bamboo poles and boulders are “ripped”
from their contexts and made to function as traces and triggers of sensation and
everyday events that occur amidst the hazardous shorelines of Batanes. The archive
is also intended to be a repository, a meeting place, a site for forums and exchange
of ideas and other materials on Island Lore, Fishing and Farming Practices, among
others –a development that could extend the role of heritage sites, from being
drab, sterile spaces of nostalgia to living spaces for human encounters.
The installation also compels us to reflect on the kumbento, a passageway,
a meeting place and stopover for residents, migratory tourists, scholars, and
transients. It finds its parallel in the vanua, a natural corridor that serves as
passageway, as transit point that divides as well as links the seen and the unseen,
marking the points where land meets sea. It is also a metaphorical transit point
between material, psychic, and spiritual realms. These passageways make us think
of another research site - the shores of Diura, a fishing village located around two
kilometers from Mahataw. The vanua in this research site has many meanings. For
one, the vanua is a narrow and dangerous path which mataws or traditional fishers
have to negotiate skillfully, less they wander off, or if the waters are particularly
turbulent, capsize or get dashed and thrown on to the shallow terrace and rocks
that jut out here and there on both sides of this passage.
This vanua has another meaning; it is also a stopover and seasonal port for
the migratory and precious dorado or arayu (Coryphaena hippurus), the golden-
bellied migratory fish of summer. From this port, the mataws launch their tatayas
to fish for the arayu, which the mataws catch using hooks and lines, and by using
live flying fish as bait, which are in turn caught through locally-developed special
hooks, baited with freshwater shrimps and crustaceans. After a day’s fishing, the
catch is immediately hauled in, cleaned, and prepared into dried fillets, a prestige
food that will be divided and shared among crew members at the end of the
fishing season. The shared portions would later on be exchanged—as payment or
exchange—for land that had been rented out, for materials and equipment lent
to the mataw, among others. And after all the obligations have been settled, the
mataw family store receives what was left of the arayu fillet for daily sustenance
as well as to pay for education and other items that their farm lands cannot yield,
such as groceries, aside from occasional gifts to favored people.
The arayu is considered gold from the sea, “ginto ng dagat” around which
revolve elaborate rules and regulations about how to catch, haul the fish out of
the boat, clean, carry and eat. At the start of the fishing season—usually at the first
week of March –the mataws gather at the vanua or port to perform sacrificial rites
and rituals with to “make the vanua’–mayvanuvanua–to attract and invite fish to
come to their vanua. “ For the duration of the 3-month fishing season, the vanua
is a sacred and sensitive place, ”writes the anthropologist Maria Mangahas. Only
the members who participated in the ritual are allowed to launch their tatayas
from the vanua, which has to be kept clean and healthy—free of dirt, which is
synonymous with bad luck, bwisit or malas—because on such qualities depend

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 the day-to-day success or failures of the mataws’ fishing fortunes. “The mataw rites
‘make’ a negotiated ‘community’with a leader and a system of government, that
incorporates the spirits and the fish.”
The ritual, along with the taboos, comprise a kind of social control that assures
discipline, but it is a social control that is made possible, not through legal and
formal regulations—although there are some ordinances surrounding the baiting
of the flying fish, the favorite arayu prey, and of course, there are also international
laws that guard against poachers that prey on Philippine waters. As one resident
puts it: if the ritual is gone, then the Diura valugan or port becomes open territory,
more vulnerable to indiscriminate fishing and other ecologically destructive
practices. It appears—to be confirmed by more systematic research—that the
forest cover surrounding Diura is relatively more intact than that of surrounding
villages. Perhaps this is due to many other factors aside from the rituals; however,
it is safe to say that for the Diura mataw, the inner forest—or kakaywan—is not just
source of precious water, but of the freshwater shrimp, favorite bait for the flying
fish, which in turn is bait for the arayu. Forest, land, and sea are interconnected,
and it is an interconnection that is maintained through the vanua as physical,
psychic, spiritual, and cosmological space.
Benefitting from research, an interview with the artist, and reading his
concept paper, we are able, not only to identify the themes of spirituality, ecology
and everyday life, but also to analyze how these themes intricately connect in the
context of Batanes and its particular conditions. The artwork provided the space,
the passageway and vanua for researchers, artists, tourists and community to link
up to “learn, document and promote local community knowledge and respond to
environmental problems,” as Ticar writes in his concept paper.

In the above discussion, we have also seen how a single artwork and its
subject matter—the Rizal Monument and its various versions—enable a spinning
off to many thematic variations and combinations. Such complexities and insights
that result from the process would be possible only through a careful gathering
of facts, keen observation, scanning of expressive elements, and the creative
TMLSS
reconstruction of seemingly disjointed themes beyond the literal.

In this activity, you will concentrate on your concept and storyline for your
developing Creation Story. To facilitate conceptualization, you must be able to
clearly identify and agree on the following:
1. What is your story’s main theme and if applicable, its subthemes? What
D-I-Y message do you wish to communicate?
2. What do we want to achieve in our presentation? Do you aim to
persuade? Inform? Call your audience to action?
3. Who is the intended viewer of your video?
4. How are you going to communicate your message?

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 • What is the basic plot that helps impart the message to our viewer?
• How will it flow or be sequenced? Chronologically? Flashback?
Dream sequence? Non-linear quick cuts?
• What are the roles of the people or figures who appear in your
storyline? Who are the important characters? Is one of them a
hero or heroine? Are you characters human? Animals? Inanimate
objects? Plants? (trees, for example)
• Who narrates your storyline? One of the characters? Or a third
person narrator who is not part of the story but is omniscient and
seems to know everything?
• What is the tone of your video? Comical? Romantic? Dramatic?
Documentary? MTV? News feature? Reality show? Talent contest?
Consequently, will your language be formal? Colloquial? Technical?
• As early as now, think of what art form or medium are you going
to use for your presentation. Will it be in the form of video? If yes,
are you going to shoot live action? Our use Animation? Graphics?
Found footages? Or are you going to present a theater production
to be viewed live? Or comic strips? Photo essay?

1. From your cultural mapping project, can you identify artworks that pay
tribute to your town’s heroes or heroines? If there are such artworks,
gather more data about the hero. See how the artwork depicts this
hero by analyzing the medium, and techniques and its elements. What
kind of heroism do you see from this creative scanning? How does this
PIN IT connect to the social conditions of your town?
2. Compare and contrast the National Rizal Monument to Tolentino’s
Neoclassic Bonifacio Monument in Monumento. What kinds of heroism
do you see in the two sculptures?
3. From the heroes that you examine in either numbers 1 or 2, or both, what
insights in your own life can you draw? Would they inspire you? If yes,
how can you become a hero in your daily life, and what kind of hero will
you be? What advocacies will you espouse? Ecological consciousness?
Gender equality? Nationalism? Simple acts of kindness and generosity?
Animal rights?

120 Contemporary Philippine Arts from the Regions

 Create a poem, or a short, an essay, a song, or a dance to illustrate your own
personal concept of heroism in the everyday life of your community.
Share this creative output with your group. Find a common thread or threads
in your outputs. For example, you may find a common theme, advocacy, form,
color, shape, texture, medium, etcetera. Weave these common threads together
LEVEL UP and create an artwork which could be integrated into your developing Creation
Story

Datuin, Flaudette May. 2010. ”For the Birds.” The River Project. Ed. Binghui Huangfu.
Campbeltown Arts Center, New South Wales, Australia.
Guillermo, Alice. 1997. “The Text of Art.” in Datuin, Flaudette May, et. al. Art and
Society, University of the Philippines.
TL; DR Mangahas, Maria. “Fishing and Performing Fair Share.” Aghamtao, Vol. III, 2001.
______. “Managing Luck and Negotiating Change: Ethnographics of Fishing
and Sharing in the Philippines.” PhD Dissertation in Social Anthropology,
University of Cambridge, 2000.
Paulino, Roberto G. “Mediated Emplacements of Rizal Memorials Overseas.” PhD
Dissertation in Art Studies, University of the Philippines, 2013.

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121
 UNIT III
SYNCING
As the unit title implies, we have reached the part where we integrate and sync
all the parts together. In previous lessons, we learned how to creatively prepare
for the production—from gathering information and materials through research,
cultural mapping, and field work, up to conceptualization, to the scriptwriting. We
also learned how to sense art and make sense of art through close observation
and encounters with works, the better to hone our creativity and our imagination.
The previous units comprise the pre-production stage; this unit comprises the
production and post-production stages, onstage and backstage. Lesson 10
gives more concrete examples of works that bear the common characteristics of
contemporary art in Lesson 1, with focus on examples of Performance Art. Through
these examples, we also see demonstrations of how the concepts and materials of
the “local” are integrated into art. In Lesson 11, all the previous lessons are given
practical application through step by step instructions that will culminate in an
actual production that revolves around the Creation Story you have been working
on since Lesson 1.

LESSON 10: INTEGRATING THE LOCAL AND THE CONTEMPORARY

By the end of the lesson, you are expected to:

• state the main characteristics of the “local” as material for contemporary art;
• identify the range of local materials that can be integrated into art; and
• demonstrate the ways by which local materials and techniques can translate
QUEST concepts and feelings about the local and the experiential through a studio
visit and field work.

FLAG
Found Object
Ready-made
CHAT ROOM Performance art
Site-specific
Collaborative
Interactive
Artists’ initiatives

122 Contemporary Philippine Arts from the Regions

 In preparation for the production stage of your Creation Story, you will
experience first hand the ways in which your local artists integrate local materials
that are easily found and accessed from the immediate environment into their art.
Incorporated in the traditional two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects to
THREAD time-based, dance, music, electronic forms, installation, and other new or alternative
media, these materials can function as found objects and ready-mades, or as
elements of dance, music, sculpture, painting, mixed media work or installation, as
well as production design or animation material, among others. These options tell
us that the “local” has to do, not only with what is homebound and accessible, but
also about with what is ever-changing and fluid. The local involves not just actual
spaces but also virtual, musical and electronic environments, among other realms,
which now make up what is within reach or what can be considered the everyday
for a wired generation of learners.
As we also learned in the previous lessons, mediums or materials are not
just tangible objects which artists use to make art; they are also bearers of ideas
and knowledge from people and places that can be translated in ways that are
meaningful and understandable to audiences encountering the work.
In this lesson, examples will be drawn from Performance Art, a category
from the visual arts, which, like the performing arts of music, dance, literature and
theater, also integrates various mediums in a way that stresses location, space, and
process. Performance art may also involve only one artist or a full production very
similar to theater and may include one or more sites.

FAQ What is meant by the word “local” and how can it be used as material for
contemporary art?
The “local” can refer to material that is easily available, like bamboo. The local
can also refer to wherever the artist finds himself or herself. For Diokno Pasilan,
a neo-ethnic musician-visual/performance artist and one time art director from
Negros the “local” involves various places: Baguio, Bicol, Palawan (where he
resided for a long period), and most recently Victoria, Western Australia, where he
resettled. This process entails interacting and immersing with host communities.
For example, in a performance for the Third Bagasbas Beach International
Environmental Art Festival in the Bicol region, Pasilan communicates the need to
be more aware of our natural environment by painting his body green, the color
of the environmental movement. Like a bungee jumping human anchor, he thrust
himself toward gongs tied together unto a bamboo structure - bamboo being
material that is still easily available around Bagasbas’s fisherfolk communities.
These communities provided information and support for Pasilan and other
participating artists to create their performance and site-specific work on the
Bagasbas public beachfront.

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 Figure 10.1. Pasilan, Gong Fishing (2010)

Another work which used bamboo as basic material is Digital Tagalog, a

collaboration between Lani Maestro and Poklong Anading, artists who are known
for creating multi-sensory environments that come out of their research about
the contexts of spaces and communities. Shown in Mo Gallery in 2012, Digital
Tagalog used bamboo to construct physical nodes and create sounds. They also
used found and crafted sounds, some of which were inspired and sourced out of
the digitized audio files of National Artist for Music Jose Maceda (housed in the UP
College of Music Center for Ethnomusicology). This collaborative and combined
use of the visual and musical made the work particularly interactive. The artists
encouraged viewers to be active creators themselves. Within a small room, visitors
could make up playlists which not only could be streamed through personal
listening devices, but also could be amplified within the larger gallery space. This
larger site was where bamboo-made music they themselves produced could
overlay the digitized sound selected by the impromptu musician-deejays working
with sound in the smaller room.
Still other artists create work by reinventing not just tangible objects like
bamboo, but other artforms sourced from the performing arts of ritual, music
and dance. Davao-based choreographer Agnes Locsin used the techniques of
modern dance to reinterpret a component of the Moriones Holy Week festival
of Marinduque. The Moriones narrates the story of Roman centurion Longino’s
conversion to Christianity upon the healing of his blindness by the dying Jesus
whom the soldier had been ordered to guard. Performed in France (as Ballet
Philippines’s entry to the Recontres Festival Du Danse) by male dancers moving
to “Serra Pelada” of the avant-garde composer Philip Glass, the dance reinterprets
the story through costumes (centurions are shown without full masks, hefty
breastplates, nor swords or spears) and movements not associated with classical
ballet and folk dances. Bodies of the dancers are sharply angled, with unpointed
toes, contorted anatomical positions, and staccato military gestures to dramatize

124 Contemporary Philippine Arts from the Regions

the soldiers’ search for the centurion turned fugitive. A clip of the performances may
be found at (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkcn4QEaPwo). The dancers’
bodies are made to leap and address each other in flawless precision as a unit at one
moment and break up into individual cadence at another. With minimalist lighting
and stage design, the dance combines the familiar and unfamiliar: audiences are
still able to recognize the story, such as the chase scene, but at the same time, they
are also viewing the story through another lens and from another perspective.

Figure 10.2. Locsin’s Moriones for Ballet Philippines

A similar example that involves reinvention of festival is seen in a project

called “Lucban Assembly/Systems of Irrigation Project.” Done during the annual
mid-May Pahiyas festival by Quezon-based artists of Project Space Pilipinas and
their guest artists, this consisted of art installed along the procession route. Curated
by another independent initiative of writers called DiscLab, the works were placed
strategically along that route so that visitors and locals alike would not miss or
overlook them. Some of the artists also responded creatively to these spaces
by using materials they could readily find in the area and to which perceivers
of the works would easily relate to because they trigger familiar memories and
associations.
The artists organized and documented the activities by combining
interpersonal and virtual ways of working, including digital invites and live
stream conference segments, in effect creating a parallel virtual festival. (Check
http://projectspacepilipinas.com/project/first-lucban-assembly-2/to see more
documentation of what went on during several weeks of Lucban Assembly’s
activities from May-June 2015.)
We can see here that the use of new media channels makes possible the
exchange of information, from instructional materials on a range of topics, to
portfolios. Collaborations may be formed: weavers find fair trade distributors,
artists get to work with others beyond the Philippines, authors get to self-publish.
Technology is thus used more productively beyond trending.
The combination of “old school” events like the fiesta and web platforms
illustrate how the local and traditional can converge to generate new ideas and
forms of expressing and communicating, in local, global and cyber spheres. Artists
have access to less guarded, more dispersed, and more flexible means to reach out

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