listahan ng maniningil graphite on paper
About 2019, I guess, I began fangirling on Jo Tanierla's work on his Instagram. But what really caught my attention was a pencil drawing of shorn and exploded bullet shells lined up on a piece of paper. This is Jo's MO apparently, he gets an old enough tattered piece of paper, and then does pencil drawings on them. Pretty straightforward enough. But I quickly felt that there was something very impolite about this certain inconspicuous piece. I've always expressed my bit of weariness towards social realism as a presentational approach. And that very gesture of approaching a subject, say a presentation of a typical poor family's makeshift living quarters on stage, becomes social realism's problematic premise. If I transpose this everyday experience of violence and turn it into functional presentation, I turn it into an object disguised as something else.
So, coming upon Jo's drawing of exploded bullet shells that seemed organic, almost like budding plants, confused and then coerced me. This arresting I found out eventually when I took on the project of curating Pagburo at Pag-alsa: Natural Depictions and Illustrated Prophecies (Gelacio, 1910) was Jo's wider modus operandi, and that is, building upon a makeshift fantasy for him to frame his drawings as something else, that can be mistaken as history. But unlike the ready come on of traditional social realist presentations, he approaches these subjects as a counterpoint to a larger form of myth-making, or that can be mistaken perhaps as knowledge/kaalaman.
Installation shot 3F sensorium, UP Vargas Museum
listahan ng maniningil variations w/ typewritten pages from Gelacio's journal
The exploded bullet shells, eventually in three variations, and titled listahan ng maniningil resists impressing reality because of its soft curling details. Strange, considering a bullet is a small brutal object that strikes and lodges itself in the organic. In this drawings, this brutal act has been made languid, almost contemplative, and that's why it still continues to confuse me with its impoliteness. The initial drawing appeared at the sustained height of the Duterte administration's rampant and relentless killings. Too many to mention and too many to name, but then instead of something gratifying, listahan ng maniningil quickly turns graphic: there is a bullet coming for each dissenter, activist, peasant, cultural worker, indigenous folk, for each of us. Then it becomes personal, becomes memory, for each shattered bullet shells acquire distinction, or the very ghosts that haunt and will haunt the state.
There are three makeshift systems that Jo had already put in place: 1.) the drawings, 2.) a series of texts in the form of a journal, and 3.) the prophecy of Manta-tio. Having no previous experience in exhibitory practice, but with ample experience in dealing with odd spaces where my performances erupt, I proposed to Jo that we make use of the seeming sparseness of his drawings and texts, and let the spaciousness dictate how we're to arrange his collection.
3F northwing gallery, UP Vargas Museum
With the series of texts that form Gelacio's journal, dated chronologically so the narrative of Gelacio's story points directly to Manta-tio's prophecy, the objective in the subsequent arrangement wasn't to scatter the story into pieces but to invoke what seemed at the beginning of the project as finality. Gelacio, who in Jo's narrative is an itinerant student in 1910 Manila, goes on a journey through parts of Luzon with soothsayer Manta-tio. This journey marked as actual places in the journal entries simultaneously forms a cartography of Gelacio and Manta-tio's understanding of the world they experience and record, that of the plight of indios against colonizers, and peasants and workers against landowners and compradors.
But I had an apprehension: the journal text alone cannot sustain the narrative, ie the mode in which Gelacio and Manta-tio have to tell their story, and the journey invoked within that narrative. Fiction on paper demands resistance in a way that you differentiate that what you are reading isn't exact reality, yet you suspend your disbelief, and the realization of such disparity between fiction and exigent only occurs after the last sentence of the tale. Fiction's potency relies on this very differentiation. Aside from the ready geography a chronological story creates, I wanted Jo's drawings and texts to occupy a spatial rather than textual continuity. This continuity will then allow visitors to differentiate the moment where fiction commences, that is, Gelacio and Manta-tio's journey of reckoning with their reality, and where Pagburo and Pag-alsa terminates the fantastic so as to become emancipatory, meaning, these objects are from our exigent material world, and therefore say something of the conflicts and contradictions our material world engenders.
Altar ng Sakuna at Dusa graphite on paper, in earth
Our task then became, how to render fiction physical? It came in the most obvious answer Jo came up with: lupa. Altar ng Sakuna at Dusa started off as graphite on paper. It shows a bust of Duterte surrounded by rotting things such as lacerated lungs, and other fascist paraphernalia, most notably an oversized bullet. As most altars of worship prescribe severity, Jo's depiction of rigid fascism did register decaying orderliness but it also, well, to put it bluntly, looked attractive. Jo decided to bury it for a month, attaching it first on very thin wood. What emerged after was literal decay. It was necessary, I think, to bring in the surrounding dirt from which the piece was set not only to emphasize the actualization of fiction that we wanted to achieve, but also to create a unique moment of ambiguity, which is also equally essential in fiction building. What do we recognize here, are we burying this mad man, or have we unearthed a cursed fetish that is causing all this pain, death, and misery?
Copy of Muqi Fachang's Six Persimmons, ink on paper; Kuwadro ni Pilar Lazaro, graphite on paper;
welga sa Trambiya, Maynila, graphite on paper; pan de sal at kesong puti, graphite on paper
Anthurium fascium, watercolor on paper w/ fragment drawings and typewritten texts from Gelacio's journal
What flanks this narrative and actualized fiction are portraits of objects and other mementos on either corridors of the third floor. There is a piece I wasn't particularly fond of at the beginning, Copy of Muqi Fachang's Six Persimmons. But when we began laying out the drawings with the texts, Six Persimmons' supposed provenance in Jo's story made me laugh; Gelacio, also a student of painting, during their pit stop in Escolta copied Fuchang's Six Persimmons displayed on a random street stall, and then unhappy with the outcome of his copy noted, ampanget. This kind of mundane anecdotes scattered all throughout Gelacio's journal only gains tract because they are underscored by larger social ferment, pagburo. A day of frivolity quickly turns to unrest when a tranvia workers protest is provoked then dispersed by constabularies; and Manta-tio, whose provenance is most likely that of a tulisan, remembers a massacre where she wakes up among the piles of the dead.
But it's the fantastic that captures these historical horrors and not realism. Parallel Six Persimmons on the other corridor is another type of copy. Anthurium fascium is watercolor on paper; it is a naturalist rendition of a fictional plant that, according to Gelacio, smells of rotting corpses that then attracts flies. Again, we come upon ambiguity, as there are actual giant flowering plants, amorphophallus titanum and genus rafflesia, that simulates the scent of rotting meat to attract pollinators. This is counterproductive in terms of knowledge production. Who's to corroborate that anthurium fascium doesn't really exist, or maybe worse, in a more sinister form?
palay-dugo, detail, watercolor on paper w/ wall text
Though I do take this route of "corroborator", somewhat. I interrupt Jo's fiction with my own fiction in the form of an unsent manuscript from a mestizx writer F. Salomé, also fictional (what is not fictional though is Filipinas Revista Seminal Ilustrada, a women's magazine concurrent with Jo and Gelacio's 1910 timeline). It functions as it is, a redundancy in the makeshift system. Before the exhibit opened, Kara, Vargas Museum assistant asked if there was a need for the museum to go along with the fiction. I felt there was really no need for an enigma that would result in some kind of exposé, so F. Salomé's text seemed like a sufficient cop out. I don't think it is Jo's intention to fool anyone with fiction, though it is one of fiction's most satisfying outcomes. But like the earth that actualized the fantasy, the wall text functions both as an exposition on the exhibit's fictive character, and also something that is alongside it. While Jo criticizes a categorical imperative which is the colonial historical archive as a supposedly reliable mode of knowledge production, he is also working within this very same categorical imperative; by appropriating the language of Pagburo at Pag-alsa I then corroborate this criticism.
doon kung saan halos patag ang tubig at tumitigil ang mga alon doon mababasag ang tanikala graphite on paper
agahan matapos mabasag ang tanikala graphite on paper
The sensorium, where the listahan ng maniningil variations is encased, is the visitor's final destination, much like Gelacio and Manta-tio's who ended their journey in the mountains of Pamitinan at Binacayan, finally entering a yungib where a santelmo welcomes them. In the middle of the room, spilling out of its frames is a drawing of a sea rippling almost endlessly, doon kung saan halos patag ang tubig at tumitigil ang mga alon, doon mababasag ang tanikala. What might look strange is not strange at all at this point; the ripples break, and there's a flat surface. This impolite apparition also come into view in agahan matapos mabasag ang tanikala; in this drawing we see a woman in a breakfast scene, possibly Manta-tio, but her corporeality meets the very same flat surface where the ripples break in the sea drawing. Manta-tio's prophecy on the other hand is pag-alsa, uprising. I told Jo in one of our discussions that it actually seems like the prophecy has already been fulfilled, pagburo at pag-alsa, the ferment and the uprising had already possibly happened. In fact, I had an eerie feeling that what Gelacio and Manta-tio documented for us is what remained after the event. But then, this event is only in the story. As Jo's call to action, we must return to the raging, hurtling forms of the uncertain, outside of the tale.
kamay na bakal graphite on corrugated metal sheet
All images courtesy of UP Vargas Museum
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