ARNDT Catalogue Manila

MAYNILA
MAALINSANGAN ANG GABI, MAHAPDI ANG ARAW
THE NIGHT IS RESTLESS, THE DAY IS SCORNFUL
ARNDT SINGAPORE. GILLMAN BARRACKS.
BLK 22 LOCK ROAD #01-35
WWW.ARNDTBERLIN.COM
C U R R A T E D B Y N O R M A N C R I S O L O G O
TATONG RECHETA TORRES
MIKE ADRAO
POW MARTINEZ
NORBERTO ROLDAN
GABBY BARREDO
JOSE LEGASPI
JIGGER CRUZ
ZEAN CABANGIS
KAWAYAN DE GUIA
JOSE TENCE RUIZ
SANTI BOSE
DEX FERNANDEZ
KALOY SANCHEZ
ALFREDO ESQUILLO
ALWIN REAMILLO
ARNDT SINGAPORE. GILLMAN BARRACKS.
BLK 22 LOCK ROAD #01-35
WWW.ARNDTBERLIN.COM
Working in contemporary art is a privilege and the collaboration with
living artists exiting and permanent source of inspiration and surprise.
Working with a curator is an additional thrill for the dealer, as when giving
„Carte Blanche“ to an external expert, the galerist himself is joining the
audience, in their „Vorfreude“/enthusiastic anticipation for the venue. Like
every other passionate art viewer the gallery owner is trying to imagine
what the final show will look like, impatient to witness the dialogues the
various works will enter with another.
I am that fortunate galerist and Norman Crisologo is the curator of
MAYNILA: MAALINSANGAN ANG GABI, MAHAPDI ANG ARAW
(MANILA: THE DAY IS SCORNFUL, THE NIGHT IS RESTLESS).
Norman Crisologo is not just an expert for Filippino Contemporary Art,
he is also a collector, early-on supporter and follower of many artists
careers but most importantly he is the artists friend. The idea for this
show was born during one of the fascinating expeditions Norman, Insider
and connoisseur of the incredibly rich and vibrant Philippine artworld,
took me on.
I immediately realised that if I would like to understand the recent
developements in Contemporary Philippine Art better, I would have to
explore Manila further. This vast, haunting, most vibrant and complex
social and cultural organism that accomodates so many of this countries
major artists, providing them stories, conflict and issues, some of the
sourcematerial for their work.
In one of our conversations, Norman Crisologo said that this exhibition
will be more about evoking a „feeling“ than making a curatorial statement
and far from claiming a comprehensive overview about Filippino
Contemporary Art.
I see this presentation as an „insiders guide“ and open invitation to go on
a journey to the darker side of Manila, where the inspiration lays for so
many visual artists, performing artists and filmmakers. Following in their
footsteps and spirit we can get our own „Manila-Feeling“ and insight in
this fascinating artistic universe.
I thank Norman Crisologo for this incredibly generous contribution
of enthusiasm, knowledge and passion with which he brought this
exhibition together and for his support and advice to the artists during the
production period. My utmost gratitude goes to the artists for accepting
our invitation and contributing such outstanding new work to the show.
And last but never the least, I would like to thank Sonia Jakimczyk, our
gallery manager in Singapore and Tobias Sirtl, Lisa Polten and Karina
Rozwadowska in Berlin for their steady and kind support.
Matthias Arndt
I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY,
AND I JUST SAID IT.
NORMAN CRISOLOGO
“PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF...”
It can be said that if you wander in the wilderness for 40 days
and 40 nights, you will either become a prophet or a madman.
Or perhaps both.
But in Manila, it seems that it doesn’t take that long.
As much as the city itself is a bustling metropolis, it is also a
wasteland of the lost. Stand long enough in a corner and you
can spot them: these solitary figures that stand, for all the
world rushing past them, alone. Approaching them, you may
even catch their attention long enough for them to return your
stare… and then look past you. Move in even closer, you might
even begin to discern their voices above the din, maybe reciting
strange litanies to deities that have long absconded their houses
of dwelling and left them to the devout and faithful to loiter in—or
rather they may be in conversation with the city itself, allowing it
to speak to them through the bang and clatter of the sidewalk,
the cacophony of the car horns in traffic, or the susurrus of the
waves from the bay. Arguably, these are true citizens of Manila,
who are not mere fixtures in the urban landscape but possibly,
keep the vision of the city alive—even if only in their minds.
“Maynila: Maalinsangan ang Gabi, Mahapdi ang Araw” (Manila:
The Nights are Restless, The Days are Scornful), is an exhibition
of Filipino contemporary art that collects these visions and hears
those voices. It chronicles a secret history of Manila—one that
also considers the graffiti scrawled on the walls and counts the
chalk outlines on the pavement as part of its story.
There are no heroes and villains here, just the usual suspects.
And all endings resound like the conclusion of prayers.
ERWIN ROMULO
TATONG RECHETA TORRES
There is something cinematic in the paintings of Tatong Recheta
Torres. Like stills from a complex and indecipherable feature film,
his canvases capture a specific moment, not necessarily one full
of tension or suspense, but one of anticipation. They are frames
that signal that something is about to happen.
This cinematic sensibility comes naturally from a man who grew
up under the shadows of downtown Manila’s once esteemed
but now derelict cinemas, and whose childhood was nourished
by a diet of horror and fantasy films in Betamax format. An
architecture graduate, Torres is mostly entirely self-taught in the
vocation of painting, though his apparent skill as a draughtsman
is the product of early practice.
The shifts one finds every time Torres releases a body of work
reflect a restless desire for experimentation. He takes up the
challenge of representing texture—scales, globules, hair—as
a means to build his fictive worlds. His recent obsession with
virtual reality feeds newer works where images tamed by pixels
and code cross with dreamy scenes culled from memory.
MIKE ADRAO
In an age enamored with installation, conceptual, or performance
art, does good old drawing still have a chance to be recognized?
Artists like Mike Adrao show that draughtsmanship still matters
and that drawing remains a dynamic and unexhausted field.
His large, charcoal canvases depicting anthropomorphic and
biological forms show control, rigor and imagination. These
images—each one teeming with intricate detail—are first born in
his trusted sketchbook. On a large canvas inside his tiny studio
above an Internet cafe, the mild-mannered Adrao lays them
out and pieces them together in a slow, deliberate, physically
demanding but sometimes meditative process.
For this show, his ruminations on the sinister qualities of the city—
the decadence, the corruption, the environmental negligence, the
temptations of wealth and power—yield a charcoal, chiaroscuro
work that is an allegory of life in the Philippine capital. It shows
how little by little one is consumed by the grip of its structures and
systems. Integrating Philippine currency vignettes and lacework,
exploding manunggol jars and reptilian elements, the work can
be turned upside-down, mimicking the topsy-turvy manner of
existence in a desperately dense and chaotic setting.
POW MARTINEZ
Irreverent, farcical, fantastic. Such can be said of the paintings of Pow Martinez, whose images
range from improbable, cartoonish scenes executed in rough strokes to heavy impastos that
near abstraction. He remains a believer of painting, of its endurance and inexhaustible potential.
Perhaps the genre now suffers from the ease of falling to predictability and commoditization,
which Martinez heavily guards his practice against. And so what he delivers are works that echo
the city he lives in: brash and unpredictable, never tame.
Consider his two pieces here. One depicts the contortions of a hermaphrodite-like figure
whose breasts and other extremities pull out like gum. The other mimics a familiar high point of
many suspense films: the dining scene. We bear witness to what is supposed to be a revolting
instance of cannibalism, but Martinez has caricatured it to an almost comic effect.
Such works reveal the irony that has become a leitmotif in the artist’s practice. Another is the
fight against safe, sentimental, and pleasure-seeking aesthetics. Yes, this might be bad art for
some, but perhaps rebellion is the point of the exercise. This hard-headedness and certain
distrust for the ruling convention may have rubbed off from living in a city that saw many
revolutions, and has long prized freedom of expression and individuality. Martinez confides he
likes the city’s dirt and grit, and he allows his paintings to be similarly so. He prefers to ransack
what is from the underground, the counterculture, the juvenile. Settling for what is mainstream
is just plain insulting.
NORBERTO ROLDAN
“Every act an artist makes is political,” says Norberto Roldan.
In his paintings, installations, or intricate assemblages, one can
always detect the biting social criticism in his works. Be it attacks
on colonialism and rampant consumerism or oppressive systems
of power, he has made his practice an avenue not just of personal
expression but pure activism. For him, it is unconscionable that an
artist does not engage. “One cannot turn a blind eye on political
reality, no matter how apolitical your art may be.” To Roldan,
every artist is part of a community and a country, and his practice
has to find its place within these. Such political decisions extend
to activities far beyond art-making. One example is his founding
and running of Green Papaya Art Projects, one of the longestrunning artist-run initiatives in Manila. It supports alternative and
unrepresented voices and encourages critical discourse.
His work “Quiapo: Between Salvation and Damnation” involves
a simulacrum of the famed Manila church that has been central
to the city’s cultural and political histories. More than any other
church, Quiapo has come to occupy an exceptional place within
the Filipino imagination. Here is a site where Christian, Muslim
and pagan beliefs intersect. It is where quotidian violence and
debaucheries take place so close to where religious rites are
practiced. A microcosm of Manila, the church and its grounds
mirror the city’s former glories—now drowned out by the mire of
urban blight, but also representing the colorful, divergent fabric
from which the Filipino nation is made.
GABBY BARREDO
Entering the artist’s workshop in a Manila suburb is like walking
into a laboratory found only in the pages of science fiction.
Here one finds discarded objects salvaged from junk shops,
or donations by friends who were clearing out their houses.
Under Gabriel Barredo’s hands, these unwanted materials are
given new purpose. Old action figures, limbless dolls, saints in
plastic, car parts, rubber strips, animal bone, art book cutouts,
miniscule lights, and tiny motors. Almost like a scientist, he
cuts, refashions, gilds, welds, and glues them together into an
intricate, mechanical mass. What results is captivating and oneof-a-kind kinetic art, some of which are towering in scale.
But the potency of Barredo’s work does not only lie in the flawless
regeneration of rescued material and its definitely amusing light
and electric circuitries. In fact, his work is very severe. It is littered
with details that remind us of the endless horrors and hypocrisies
of life: hunger, war, death, and decay. A screaming head here, an
impaled figurine there. There is no attempt to sugarcoat these
displays of darkness, whether they are personal or collective in
nature. Like Bosch and Brueghel, Barredo continues art’s long
tradition of depicting the monstrous and the malign. In such acts,
we are confronted with the blade-sharp truths and are provoked
to emotion.
JOSE LEGASPI
Jose Legaspi knows the human body intimately
—its creases and folds, its thickness and ends. But
his works also show a certain skepticism. In his
drawings, he subjects the body to much humiliation
and profanity, at times drawing blood. He renders
his characters ghostly and pallid, sometimes
mangled, almost like cadavers.
His works vary in texture, from his roughly doodled
pastel drawings to striking, meticulously made
photorealistic works. They sometimes portray the
artist himself or people he is close to as ghoulish
figures, often in debasing positions.
These three works of charcoal and chalk belong to
the larger ‘Phlegm’ installation. It was the outcome
of a residency Legaspi held at Art in General in New
York in 2001. According to the organization, it is
a work, “that incorporates religious iconography,
autobiography, and self-portraiture.”
One shows a man hanging from a noose, his
genitals exposed, possibly an act of suicide or a
victim of lynching. Another shows a crucified figure
bleeding profusely all over. But the most striking is
the drawing of a body, chopped up and thrown to
the rubbish bin.
It can be speculated that it is Legaspi’s training as
a biologist that affords him the distance from such
violations of the body. From one side, these can
be seen as an attack on our relentless obsession
for the youth and vanity, something that eventually
expires. From the other, they speak of emotional
torture, estrangement and rage felt by the openly
gay artist who lives in a country where conservative
attitudes still prevail.
Legaspi, who has been cited in Phaidon’s latest
global survey on drawing, Vitamin D, produces
works that pander to our basest emotions. On his
canvases, he lets the Id loose. They are a riposte
to our moralism and misplaced values. In putting
these lurid pictures into view, we see that we
haven’t seen everything in drawing yet.
JIGGER CRUZ
The tradition of western painting in Asia has had its longest
streak in the Philippines. It dates back to Spanish priests who
taught local artists to paint religious scenes for the churches
they had built. Art schools that espoused the western style
soon opened. This was followed by artists who travelled to
study in art academies in Europe, plus a generation who made a
groundbreaking encounter with modernism.
Perhaps it comes as no surprise that today’s generation of
Filipino painters seek to deviate from this thread. Or at least
remake it. One of them is Jigger Cruz, whose most recent works
explore the possibilities of painting beyond the plane. For him,
the canvas is no longer just a vessel for flat images. Rather, it
too can function like a platform, a stage on which to hold his
experiments. His probing concerns specifically with oil paint’s
physicality: volume, sheen, and viscosity.
Over an under painting, he throws very generous, almost obscene
amounts of oil paint to obtain a sculptural dimensionality. For
this show, he stacks three paintings executed in three different
modes. This is then overrun by deposits of oil almost psychedelic
in color and then cut open with a putty knife. The gross anatomy
lays bare Cruz’s present preoccupation: the constant struggle
between abstraction and figuration, as well as the relentless
battle between tradition versus the avant-garde.
ZEAN CABANGIS
A ruin can generate so much feeling of mystery.  It can be the
object of deep speculation. What is its history? How did it arrive
at such a fate? What will be its future? Such are the questions
that preoccupy Zean Cabangis, one of the youngest artists in
this show. His recent ongoing series of work was strung together
from encounters with old, abandoned houses he chanced upon
during his bicycle excursions in the mountains of the Sierra
Madre. These are houses that have been left abandoned, their
roofs caved in, walls left unfinished, and floors are overgrown
with weeds. But they are nothing more than interruptions on
the landscape—reminders of dreams that have been stunted
by financial difficulty, natural catastrophe or changes in family
circumstances.
One does not have to drive far out of the city to see such houses.
They can even be seen within gated middle class subdivisions
where properties are left abandoned and decaying as their
owners find lives in other, more prosperous shores. Cabangis
attempts to reclaim these structures’ dignity by piecing together
parts of their selves, almost brick by brick.
These works recall Fernando Amorsolo’s paintings of a Manila
destroyed by the Second World War. Flattened by bombs and
fire, they show buildings bereft of human presence and whose
glory and purpose have turned to ash.
Curator Brian Dillon in a recent show for Tate Britain showed
that ruin lust has captured the attention of artists for centuries
and that this interest continues up until today. Ruins possess
latent, quiet beauty but also portend of something uncertain, if
not ominous. They may suggest the coming of a new life out of
the rubble, but likewise reminds us of our vulnerability to the
sudden turns of fortune.
KAWAYAN DE GUIA
In the year 2007, the world reached an important milestone.
It was the first time more people lived in cities than outside of
them. Cities retain their pull because they remain places where
destinies are made and dreams realized. But not all stories of
migration to urban centers end happy. Such is the case for Ligaya
Paraiso and Julio Madiaga, the protagonists of the acclaimed
Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka’s 1975 film, Maynila sa Kuko ng
Liwanag (The Claws of Light), whose hopes of a better life far
from the province were dashed.
De Guia took his cues from this important film for his multipanel work, Ligaya de Pilipinas or “Joy of the Philippines.”
Unraveling on the pictorial plane are images suggestive of the
megacity’s promises of progress as well as chaos. It is a topical
representation of a city enjoying an unprecedented building
boom. Take the avenues to any of its several business districts
early in the morning and one sees hundreds of construction
workers off to work riding in trucks, many, much like Julio, have
come from afar to take gainful employment.
But today’s city is no less harsh than Brocka’s vision of Manila.
The capital’s development mimics the skyward trajectories of
other cities the world over, where the gap between the ultrarich who dwell in luxury penthouses and the poor who live in
shantytowns at street level are more than a few floors apart.
De Guia has received important regional prizes such as the
Ateneo, Signature, and Philip Morris art awards. His works have
shown in spaces in Singapore, Germany, China, and Australia.
He is also a primary convener of the Ax(is) art project, a collective
that organized yearly festivals in Baguio and whose output was
shown at the Singapore Art Museum at the 2013 Singapore
Biennale.
JOSE TENCE RUIZ
Recalling the seven arrows of the Christian martyr, St Sebastian, seven bars
covered in aluminum skin pierce a chunk of hammered lead. This lump,
suggestive of a prostrated body, is harnessed by a tangle of velvet belts that
seem to act both as a protective cloak and a straitjacket. At its feet are cement
slabs that carry a play on the Filipino words lumot (to molder) and limot (to
forget).
In the Philippines, religion keeps a strong foothold and the country’s artists
have been reacting since time immemorial. There are those that have and still
employ their talents to create its iconic imagery, and there are those who like
Ruiz, which criticize its processes and have braved to bring the debate to such
difficult terrain.
Ruiz is particularly attracted to contradictions that appear in organized religion.
Raised as a Catholic, he has many times reflected on the complex set of rules
a belief system imposes on its followers. The sculpture, “Excruciate Ecstasy,”
revisits the theme.
“Rules are like rope or wings. They can be your protection but they can gag
you,” he says. These can give you a sense of rootedness, but can similarly
immobilize. But people ironically crave for them, because life is chaotic and
religion has a way of stabilizing.”
His sculpture also touches on the duality of pleasure and pain. This is something
with which the Christian faithful negotiates within a universe of established
rules. Sacrifices have to be made to achieve deliverance. “All struggle moves in
and out between this two: ecstasy and pain,” he observes. It is a dichotomy he
finds baffling. It is the jumping point from which his sculpture proceeds.
Ruiz makes reference to the baroque imagery of St Sebastian, who has been
depicted in the height of spiritual ecstasy as arrows cut through his flesh.
Influenced by Ipoustéguy, Barlach, and Boccioni, he however makes use of
distilled figuration, a manner that has made an impression on the generation of
Filipino artists to which he belongs.
But make no mistake. This work is not a reckless diatribe against the Christian
belief system. Rather it is a considered and reasoned reaction to a reality within
it. The artist after all recognizes the symbiosis between art and religion, the
former advancing the message of the latter, a relationship that thrived in Europe
and thrives up to now in the Philippines.
What his sculpture does try to unravel are the idiosyncrasies that exist in that
system. From such realization, one could perhaps move towards a rethink.
That however entails Socratic humility, that one knows nothing. As Ruiz says,
“one does not own anything absolute. Everything participates with its own
contradiction.”
SANTIAGO BOSE
Baguio-born Santiago is one of the important Filipino artists
in recent history. As an art-maker, mentor, and founder of
the Baguio Arts Festival, his artistic practice has been
marked by an overwhelming desire in building a community
among artists and making their work connected to the wider
community they are situated in.
He studied painting at the University of the Philippines, but
he decided to choose other media to channel his visions.
In her book, Image to Meaning, respected critic Alice
Guillermo notes Bose’s desire to break from the limiting twodimensionality and ‘illusionist aesthetic’ of the genre. And so
he worked found objects and mixed media to give his work
its own vocabulary and dimension. This courage to take the
less treaded path got the nod of many. His art has shown in
major museums in the Asia-Pacific and he participated in
important triennials and festivals.
Guillermo distinctly highlights the spontaneous and
experimentalist tendencies palpable in Bose’s work. Equally
noticeable, as seen in his work at this show, is social and
political consciousness. The mixed media work “I love Abu
Sayaff” is one of the last works he had made before he
died in 2002 at the age of 53. It appeared at a significant
retrospective of his works at the Vargas Museum in ten years
after, in a commemorative exhibition curated by Patrick
Flores.
DEX FERNANDEZ
Graffiti has always been seen as an indicator of the prevalence
of disorder and deprivation in a city. But people ignore that it too
is a barometer for the level of self-expression. Dex Fernandez is
one of those Manila artists whose street-inspired art has obtained
a distinctive mien. His Garapata Man or ‘Flea’ Man is an original
comic-book-like character that has almost become his signature
and emblem. This caricatured representation of a man/house
parasite has appeared on public walls as stickers or spray painted
graffiti. It also appears in Fernandez’s wildly intricate murals, which
have graced walls of museums as well as commercial centers.
Another vein in Fernandez’s practice is his mixed media work. He
normally employs photographs and found images, which he overlays
with his knotty illustrations in paint. Here we see the same lighthanded dexterity to render his complex and unpredictable detailing.
These works have a hallucinatory effect on one hand, but also fires
off snippets of satire. Such exercises of wit and sarcasm, cloaked
under his dainty drawings, carry Fernandez’s own deeper views on
surviving the city. It just so happens his way of messaging is both
comfortable inside gallery walls as well as rundown streets.
KALOY SANCHEZ
A critic once wrote that the Filipino concept of privacy is
that there is none. There is evidence for it in the everyday;
from the way our traditional houses are constructed to the
way we consume content in social media. And with Manila
being the most densely populated city in the planet, it is so
easy to crash into other people’s business, whether it is by
decision or not.
Kaloy Sanchez lets us fall into such private scenes. The
painter gives us glimpses into various states of the human
condition, as they are experienced in isolation in personal
spaces: anger, loneliness, physical pleasure, mania, lethargy,
slow decay. His canvases are like windows into his subjects’
intimate lives, framing them in at a particular instance, with
us peeking through like voyeurs.
Sanchez’s depictions have been compared to the fleshy
portraits of Lucian Freud as well as the works of Egon
Schiele. The nudes that line his practice do not follow the
classical take on the idealized body, but rather leans towards
what is ordinary but genuine. Often raw, unembellished, and
monochromatic, his paintings lay bare the tentativeness of
our bodies and existence, and the psychological burden of
having to face this fact alone.
“Onania” is an explicit acrylic and graphite portrait of a
seated female wrapped in a sarong. She is pleasuring herself
inside an apartment illuminated by neon lights from the street
outside. It is a work that opens up to multiple subtexts. For
instance, this gesture easily slips into the thorny issue of the
objectification of women. Here, after all, the woman is the
focus of the gaze of three onlookers: the dog, the man offframe and the viewer.
Sanchez insists that this is not his intention. It is, however,
a remaking of an early portrait. In that work it was he who
was masturbating. Then as it is now, he revisits the theme of
taboos that remain prevalent in today’s societies in spite of
having become technologically modern. “Why don’t we talk
about it, if everyone is doing it?” he contends. Furthermore,
his work stokes a further debate: that of how much religion
should play a hand in the matters of the body and private life.
This painting and his previous one show Sanchez’s position
on where the limits could lie.
ALFREDO ESQUILLO
Quiapo has long inspired artists such as Alfredo Esquillo Jr.
who make periodic visits to this revered district of Manila
and the famed church that sits at its center. Quiapo is a
universe of its own, where Christian and pagan traditions
meld together, religious dogma intertwines with the occult
and superstition, while commerce does its business on one
side. The periphery of the church is the site where many of
these beliefs are professed; some are even brazenly peddled.
On its pavement, aphrodisiacs, sex toys, and implements for
black magic share space with amulets, prayer books, and
Christian holy figures. Bizarre and almost contradictory, their
coexistence points to a culture that places high importance
on devotion and faith.
One of Quiapo’s established characters has been the subject
of Esquillo’s artwork for more than a decade. Lauro Gonzales
or Mang Lauro, a one-time trader turned preacher, believed
that the Philippines is the New Jerusalem. This prophet of a
belief tinged with nationalism has appeared in many of the
artist’s hyperrealist paintings and has been the subject of one
of his video documentaries. On one hand, it is the resonance
of Mang Lauro’s life story to that of Esquillo’s own father
that made the preacher interesting to him. On the other, it is
also what Mang Lauro represents: The embodiment of the
country’s relationship with spirituality, one that is intensified
and made complex by the interweaving of belief systems,
both foreign and indigenous.
ALWIN REAMILLO
You know you are in Filipino home if there is a picture of the Last Supper in the dining room.
This iconic scene showing Jesus Christ partaking his last meal with his disciples before he is
crucified is a fixture in Filipino dining setting. But while there is nothing extraordinary of finding
this scene in a dining area—Leonardo da Vinci’s “Il Cenacolo” after all was painted in a dining
hall—what is notable is the Biblical scene’s persistence as a subject for artists throughout the
centuries and across countries.
Alwin Reamillo has produced a large-scale cabinet to frame a refashioned Last Supper
layered with political undertones. Its base print consists of versions of the painting taken from
the internet and another by an unknown artist, mass-produced and sold on the sidewalks of
Quiapo church.
A version of this textile work of was first seen in a previous five-city installation, “Semena
Santa Cruxtations.” It is now reincarnated as the focal point of this tableau. One can make
out the glow of light that illuminates Christ at the center, while the apostles huddle at his side.
Normally coming in a frame, this common and kitschy icon is enlarged to create an expanse
suggestive of a theatre curtain, with the cabinet acting as the proscenium to the artists’
narratives.
The detritus of human presence and consumption interrupts this solemn scene. There are
plastic bottles, syringes, cow bones, spoons and mortar, garlic peelings, and hair. Peppering
it are text, company logos, and graphics, some image grafted by the artist into the fabric like
skin, to join the cast of Disney characters looming in the background.
The result is a work that overflows with iconography that reveals the artist’s current
preoccupation: identity formation and loss through the homogenization of culture as a result
of transnationalism and globalization. He also makes salient the economies of power that fuel
this condition.
One leitmotif that makes an appearance in this piece is the matchbox—an object that Reamillo
has repeatedly reimagined as a form and carrier of images and meaning. In fact, this tableau
is an oversized matchbox. Matchboxes are a product of industry and commerce, a container
of graphic imagery. They are portable and disposable. But what they contain carry a certain
power: the capacity to bring something to light and start a fire.
MANILA: THE CITY THAT WOULD NOT WEEP
In geological terms, Manila lies on young swamps, created from
the pressure exerted by basaltic magma beneath the earth’s crust,
emerging from the womb of the Pasig River only within the last
1.7 million years, or 62 million years after the dinosaurs massasphyxiated. For 99.95% of its history, Manila was occupied by
Stegodons, then elephants. Christ, Caesar, and Confucius had been
dead for over a thousand years before the (so far) earliest traces
of humans in Manila were discovered. The discovery was made in
the 1960s, in the now low-key Santa Ana district, beside one of the
very few old Manila churches that had survived the Second World
War. A mass grave site was unearthed, with over two hundred
bodies buried together with over one thousand pieces of Chinese
earthenware dated to around 1000 to 1200 CE. Some of these
bodies were found with Chinese plates inverted over their faces
and over their sex organs. No one knows why, though modern-day
minds might assume that some sort of Christian modesty had an
influence. The graves are likewise oriented in a scatter of directions,
except towards the East. Again, no one knows why.
The etymological story of Manila skews towards the pastoral, rooted
in unremarkable mangrove shrubbery that once dominated the
shores of Manila Bay. Scyphiphora Hydrophyllacea in Linneanese,
nila in Tagalog. “May nila,” (there is nila), a helpful native once told
an imperious stranger who demanded to know where he stood.
Filipinos have always been known for their kindness to strangers.
It was strangers from Spain who undertook the organization of
Manila as a city, with all the formal paperwork that was involved.
The Spanish were not the first Westerners to set foot in Manila; the
Portuguese had already been engaged in trade with Manileños.
Rajah Soliman, the young ruler of Manila, had heard of the Spanish
conquest of other islands in the archipelago. He sought to bide
time. When the first Spanish warships sailed into Manila Bay, he
entered into a pact of friendship with Goiti, the leader of the armada.
This pact, as with a disturbing number of prominent contracts in
Philippine history, was sealed in blood. Soliman, however, had every
intention of slaughtering his new fair-skinned friends but thought it
prudent to await first the arrival of the rains in June. Fatefully, Manila
in June of 1571 remained dry, and the forces of the just-as-devious
Goiti attacked first.
The kingdom led by Soliman was pacified in short order. The
considerable Chinese community, which had already settled in
Manila, proved more difficult to regulate. The new Spanish overlords
confined these Chinese residents (whom they called Sangleys) into
a ghetto known as Parian. Due to occasional Sangley revolts, the
Parian would be destroyed then rebuilt in 1581, 1583, 1588, 1597,
1603, 1629, and 1642. After each pogrom, author Nick Joaquin
says, “Manila would find itself without masons, cooks, barbers,
carpenters, cobblers, tailors, smiths, scribes, printers, cowboys and
accountants.” In the end, the Sangleys would be relocated into a
new district known as Binondo, which still stands today, claimed as
the oldest Chinatown in the world.
The saving grace of the Spaniards was that they did not bring
with them the same communicable diseases that wiped out 90%
of the peoples they conquered in the Americas. Or perhaps the
Malay stock was just sturdier. The Spanish also brought with them
Christianity—of the muscular sort honed from the centuries-long war
of liberation of the Spanish homeland from the Moors. The Catholic
prelates appear to have been especially perverse towards the wellbeing of the natives to whom they preached. The Philippines is the
only former colony of Spain today where Spanish never took hold as
the common popular tongue, in large part due to the refusal of the
friars to have Filipinos learn the language. A succession of secular
Spanish municipal governments installed in Manila were frustrated
by the insistence of the Church to maintain control; one GovernorGeneral found himself at the receiving end of a murderous lynch
mob stoked by most unpacifist friars.
There is no escaping that despite the constitutional wall that divides
church and state, the Philippines remains Catholic to the bone. Every
television station pauses programming at three in the afternoon to
broadcast a prayer dedicated to the Divine Mercy of Jesus. Every
government office has a Catholic altar at worst, a Catholic prayer
room at best, perhaps to help mitigate the stench of corruption
that otherwise pervades. The most attended events inside even
the toniest of shopping malls are the Sunday masses. Yet Filipino
Catholicism is a brand that developed with minimal interference
from faraway Rome, more susceptible to the influence of old animist
instincts than of the European doctors of the Church.
Go to Quiapo Church, home of a much-touched, much-kissed Black
Nazarene statue. Unless the doors are shut (and they rarely are), the
scene inside is of constant frenzy. There are the walkers roaming
from venerated icon to venerated icon; the stationary kneelers
offering thanksgiving sometimes, desperation more often; and the
walking kneelers going down the center aisle at glacial pace in the
belief that the greater pain inflicted on the patella, the greater the
heavenly gain.
The public square that lies outside Quiapo Church, known as Plaza
Miranda, features an unorganized market of hawkers selling a wide
variety of herbs and potions, none of them coming with a seal of
approval from a government regulatory agency, but each of which
comes with a guarantee of better health, if not bowel movements. It
is an adventure to go to Plaza Miranda, which once was touted as the
local version of Hyde Park but now occupies the dingier subsection
of the Dickensian universe. Two notorious acts of political violence
occurred at Plaza Miranda. In 1947, a barber hurled a grenade at a
platform where President Manuel Roxas was delivering a speech.
A quick-thinking general kicked the yet-unexploded grenade from
the stage onto the crowd; no one really remembers the name of
the two people in the crowd who were killed by the resulting blast.
In 1971, yet another grenade exploded during a political rally at
Plaza Miranda. This time there was no one to deflect the grenade,
so several dignitaries were injured. All of the nine persons who died
were killed offstage as they stood among the throng.
One of those injured in the 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing was Ramon
Bagatsing, then a Congressman opposed to the rule of President
Ferdinand Marcos. The bomb cost Bagatsing one of his legs, but
helped gain him election that year as Mayor of Manila. Within a few
years, Marcos had imposed rule by martial law, with Bagatsing by
now a Marcos stalwart who remained mayor of Manila until three
days after Marcos was ousted in 1986. Bagatsing remains the most
prominent Filipino of Indian decent to achieve high political office.
His constituents, predictably, called him “Bumbay”; a nickname
which he accepted with aplomb despite the racist overtones;
Filipinos have been calling émigrés from the Indian subcontinent
“Bumbay” ever since the first Sepoys arrived in Manila, as part of
the British invasion force that arrived in 1762.
It may come as a surprise to learn that for two years (1762-1764),
Manila formed part of the British Empire, an afterthought of the
Seven Year’s War. Manileños were unmoved; they continued with
afternoon siestas instead of high tea. The Spanish, though, were
unnerved by the exposure of their vulnerability. After regaining
Manila, they reorganized the city’s defenses, eliminating several
districts by relocating their population. Towns in Manila such as
Bagumbayan, San Juan and Santiago disappeared even from the
collective memory.
The rest of Manila withstood several attempts at elimination. Almost
every resident developed smallpox, and the survivors lived with
the scars. There was a plague in 1628 and in 1645 and earthquake
so catastrophic that hardly any buildings were left standing (The
Spanish did not bother to record how many Filipinos had died in the
quake). Another earthquake in 1863 destroyed the main cathedral
and the Governor’s palace among others. The blow from which
Manila nearly did not survive was the eponymous battle waged
over it between the Americans and the Japanese invaders, in the
closing months of the Second World War. The strategic destruction
by the Japanese of key bridges left the most affluent districts of
Manila isolated, ripe for the killing. Those who were trapped were
slaughtered where they stood, or herded into dank prison cells
or churches where they were slaughtered where they knelt. Even
the President of the German Club was sliced with bayonets as he
invoked the eternal friendship of Tojo and Hitler. While the Japanese
killed the people; the Americans destroyed the buildings with bombs.
The walled city of Intramuros, once the heart of Spanish rule over
the islands, ceased to exist after nearly four hundred years. Only
one structure remained standing after the American bombs did their
worst: San Agustin Church. It had been deliberately spared so that
American G.I.s navigating through the ruined city would have one
visual point of reference that identified where they were. Today, San
Agustin Church is the oldest surviving building in the Philippines.
Immediately after the war, the newly independent Philippines,
through its Congress, voted to build a great memorial that would
commemorate the lives and legacies lost in February of 1945. No such
memorial was ever built. The great Manila Cathedral, reconstructed
just eighty years before, after the great 1863 earthquake, remained
for years a massive ruin. In time, refugees from much less massive
ruins rebuilt their lives within the rubbles of the church. They were
eventually driven out when they rebuilt the grand church, but they
relocated elsewhere in the city, bearing the same lack of hope.
Manila soon teemed with slums of the sort that was fodder for fundraising appeals by humanitarian groups. Once, there was a grand
dame named Imelda who was seen fit to be installed as governor
of Manila. Her solution to the slum problem was to build high walls
that sheltered the informal settlers from the prying eyes of her jetset friends such as George “Zorro the Gay Blade” Hamilton and Van
“Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1” Cliburn.
Manila has more people now, in part because contraception is not
readily available and public health advances now allow more people
to live into their sixties. The slums remain, as with the rich and the
aspirants to be rich. Manileños of vastly unequal states have come
together, as always, in an unsettled but necessary co-existence, not
only with each other, but also with the ghosts of many more who, if
given another stab, would have much preferred a life that was not
unfair.
Oliver X.A. Reyes
acknowledgements and credits
Photos Tim Serrano
words Irwin Cuz, OLIVER X.A. REYES
CATALOGUE DESIGN AugGie fontanilla
Erwin Romulo, Kissa Castañeda mcdermot, Kristine Caguiat,
Dawn Atienza, Marya SAlang, Tina Fernandez, Lorrie Ojeda, trickie lopa,
The Santi Bose estate, Jason Tan, Patricia Barcelon, Mica Solmoro, Anna Disini,
Esquire Philippines and the entire ARNDT family.
Curated by Norman Crisologo
Music by Electronicoups, Caliph8, Malek Lopez and Moon Fear Moon