12.24.09 kulturnatib

Real Santa

Rarely does an opportunity arise to be a real Santa. As we get older, the more we realize that Santa is nothing more than figment of the great consumerist imagination. Yet, along with comes the realization that now, more than when we were younger, is the time to realize Santa. To make him or her real.

In our culture and in other cultures as well who practice this, godfathers and godmothers are the real Santas. Beyond the consumerist trappings of perfunctory gift-giving, godmothers and fathers have the opportunity, the moral responsibility even, to share. Not just things but experiences, advice, a fully engaged and non-judgemental ear and, most especially, time.

Recently, I received a letter from a friend in behalf of a son who is one of two children I have accepted the responsibility of being a godfather to. I will not mention either of their names, the father's and the son's, for I have not secured their permission to do so as this goes to press.

The letter talks about the once-in-a-lifetime and possibly a lifetime defining opportunity for the son. He has been shortlisted to be part of the Philippine Team to compete in the Gothia Cup – the soccer (I prefer football) world cup for youth in Gothenburg, Sweden, which, according to the letter, will be played right around the time for the greatest show on earth – the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa next year.

Football has always been my game even if I didn't have much ambition with it despite playing on a high school varsity team and later on a U.S. college varsity team that saw us playing for a summer in England.

This lack is most remarkable in the fact that I have no memories of any of the games we played – except that we played uniformly badly, at least by European standards, scoring the barest minimum goal in all the games, which the British call nil, which somehow sounds more professional than zero.

The best I remember of that trip is dropping in on a performance of Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' with the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, visiting the Tate Gallery that featured a retrospective by Salvador Dali and buying an old copy of art criticism by that venerable British art critic, John Ruskin from an antique book shop.

I'm sure my friend's son will have a different experience should his trip push through. For one, he is younger. He appears to have a more competitive drive. And he will be in a truly international competition where the Philippines, in its dismal history of international sports participation, has had a stellar showing.

The letter was actually asking for advice on whether his trip should push through. I think there is no question of 'should.' The question more is 'could'. This is a question for Santa, an opportunity, as I said earlier, for a real Santa. With enough real Santas its a short trip from should to could to will.

I have started to talk to friends here about which team they are rooting for in the coming world cup. I have said I don't know yet. Now I do. While it won't be the same cup, it doesn't matter.

Or, it actually matters more. I will have a godson, by God and golly, vying for the cup, which once more, even if from a distance, won't just be another spectator sport. Waaaaaave.

12.10.09 kulturnatib

Elephants and painting

Our daughter, just past infant, goes to a French speaking day care center. We have decided that it will be her mother tongue. She is learning it fast, as children do any language amongst the company of their peers and in the custody of the home. And she picks up songs rather keenly.

The other week, out of the blue, she started saying something that had us scratching our heads. We couldn't figure what it was except that it was probably something she picked up from the day care center. We figured, further, that it must be a fragment of a song.

We were right on both counts. I was intrigued by what the song turned out to be when we finally unraveled it. Even with my stagnating command of French I easily recognized – after we teased it out -- the phrase that, loosely translated, said, “To paint in oil is very difficult, much better (less difficult) to paint with water (watercolor).”

The first half of this song is actually also French 101. It is about an elephant with a trunk, an enormous trunk. How both parts of the song connect or relate is anybody's guess.

But it was the second part that intrigued me. How did this piece of artistic mythology or misconception really find its way into a children's song, which could be a testament to the French's affinity or proclivity for painting, if nothing else?

Yet, children's songs being the copyright resistant pieces of cultural treasures that they are whose pedigree or patrimony are a tangled ball of thread, there is probably no profit in inquiring into the hows or even whodunits of this song.

Still, better to educate our daughter, as soon as she is big enough, that this song and others of this genre are not all that factual. Or, to say that these songs have nothing, if little, to do with facts. It is even entirely possible that, especially with this song, facts are beside the point and fancy all of the point.

But, yes, as I have learned in my attempt at a degree in Fine Arts major in Painting, it is the other way around. Watercolor is the more difficult medium than oil. That is if you consider a good watercolor painting to be one that keeps to the essential translucent and delicate quality of the medium.

To achieve this one must, above all, be a master of the controlled accident. This is especially true with a technique that is called -- rather suggestively of something more prurient than painting – the wet on wet technique.

Wet can be just an area or the entire paper brushed on with water followed by a coat of wet color that can be applied with a paint brush, flicked on with a toothbrush or any other implement capable of delivering a layer of color.

The difficulty or the art, as practitioners no doubt would like to call it, is knowing how relatively wet or dry each should be. This takes precision, patience and practice. Because there is no fixity with water, one has to have liters of patience, and because even patience will run out, one must be willing to practice endlessly.

Or, in my case, one has to start practicing again. It is one thing to discuss all these with our daughter, it is entirely another thing to show her.

12.03.09 kulturnatib

Crocodile

Last week, while following the recent Maguindanao massacre over the internet, one picture that accompanied a Yahoo news story with the tagline, “Philippine massacre suspect calls charges 'baseless',” caught my attention.

This was a Reuters photograph of two NBI agents escorting alleged mastermind and massacre leader Andal Ampatuan Jr., upon his arrival at the Villamor air base after his surrender, according to him, his family and supporters or arrest, according to the government.

This is a standard 'firing-squad' photo where the main personages in a news story are neatly arranged or close cropped in a single line with the most important of them closest to, if not in the very middle.

This is the least interesting of photos in the grab bag of photojournalism save for its most utilitarian aspect which is to put a human face or human faces on an event that as far as this event goes can only be generously called truly inhuman.

As far as the face presented in the photo, it is a nondescript one. A young, even childish face, plump as only an overweight government official can be with an added burden of being a leader – though perhaps of a junior rank -- of a non-government organization of armed personnel in a territory where guns are a dialect unto themselves.

Yet, it is not the face that captures my attention, rich as it may be as a subject for physiognomical study. What does is what the face is wearing on its head.

It is a head gear. A head band, with a design that can easily be called 'ethnic' in the geometric style and with colors that this label sticks to almost reflexively.

Immediately upon noticing this, questions jockeyed with each other in my head. Here, some of them in no particular order: Is the headgear design typical of his 'tribal' affiliation? Is this even a typical headgear of this 'tribe' or of the region? Does this headgear denote something? Authority? Rank? A particular connotation when dealing with non-tribal personages or non-ceremonial events? Etc.

I needed a closer look. Or, even a look at other pictures – a related gallery that now typically accompanies internet news stories -- that might shed a clarificatory light on this particular picture and these questions.

I did both with the first act providing a detail that pulled the rug from under my earlier questions, though not as completely as to make them irrelevant, and made the second a mere perfunctory, even simply voyeuristic act.

In the middle of the headgear (or the way it was worn put this right smack in the middle of the forehead) was something that immediately jumped out. Or, maybe that should be, snapped out. Not only because it was of a highly contrasting color (mostly white against overwhelmingly red), design (organic against geometric) and context (global against tribal).

It was a crocodile. The proprietary trademark for the global clothing giant Lacoste and, for a while, IZOD as well. I could not repress a smile, which just as well could have been a smirk.

While Lacoste's crocodile for all its pedigree and ubiquity has nothing to do with the political symbolism of the crocodile especially as applied to Philippine politics, Ampatuan's is nothing else but that very symbol. And worse. But, how appropriate.

11.05.09 kulturnatib

From short to top

June last year I wrote about being shortlisted – two entries -- for the Bank Street North Rehabilitation Project Bike Rack Art competition.

Not much longer after, those two were in the finals list, which, among other things, kept my correspondence with the Ottawa Public Art Program going, mainly from their end regarding my entries that by then had moved into the implementation phase in this project's Gannt chart and from then on the works' movement on this chart.

It was not so one-sided though. I wrote to ask if it was possible to document on video the works as they were to be worked on by the metal-working contractor. I had heard (or maybe read) that there is this new metal cutting technology whose cutting blade was not solid as a rock, rather, liquid as water, sprayed pinpoint at extreme high pressure.

After some back and forth, I was turned down. Citing proprietary technology, the contractor, I was told, demurred. How so, I wondered, at a time when even the recipe for making a nuclear bomb in one's basement is easily accessible in the internet?

But, I did not insist.

Also, I sent invitations to my shows and other art events. The program administrator, Melissa Ramsden, while an ordinary functionaire in the French sense of being a government worker or official, was not just an ordinary functionary in the English sense of a mere bureaucrat.

She was into the arts even after office hours. Or, maybe, being in her position, her office hours were like artist's hours. All hours, in short. It was during such times, after regular office hours, that we bumped into each other at exhibit openings and other art events.

Yet another of such events was to take place today, which I had somewhat forgotten about even if I had mentally written it in big bold red letters in my mental white board – really more like a magic slate that empties as soon as the writing surface is lifted with the next thought – as soon as I received the email invitation the other week.

But, the other day, I received a phone call while cooking a late and hurried lunch. A bit irritatedly I picked up the phone, my mobile which is a tricky instrument to jam and balance between shoulder and ear while the hand attached to the engaged shoulder is busy.

Ms. Ramsden was on the other end, asking, first, if I had not forgotten about today's event, second, if I was going to be there, and third, if they could use one my works for the symbolic unveiling of the entire 60 or so bike racks in the whole project.

We thought the bike lock cum biker glyph was an appropriate symbol for the unveiling, unlocking the whole project to the public as it were, she said. Even if, as you know, this is really just half-way finished with the rest of the racks still awaiting installation, she continued.

I don't mind, I said, while thinking, personally, I find the other design more visually and thematically appealing with its meshing of gears that turn to flowers and vice-versa.

In last year's column referred to above, I ended by saying, like the British Booker Prize for literature, to be shortlisted is prize enough. Now, a year later, it appears that, toplisted – though this is strictly a manner of speaking as there is no ordinal scale in this competition -- I have more than enough.

10.22.09 kulturnatib

Nothing new

Many artists, I included for sure, have this overarching pride – half a step, really, to hubris – that what they do, their art, is something new, that it is something that has never been done before.

To them, and myself, it is always a good and humbling reminder to heed the ancient voice of the prophet of the Song of Solomon; There is nothing new under the sun.

When preparing, in the summer of 2008, for a performance art piece -- a performative action, as I have now learned to call these pieces -- involving alphabet noodles I thought this was a first. For myself, certainly, and quite possibility for the whole of Art as well.

But last weekend, this bubble was burst.

I was involved in a performance art event with nine other artists, six of them coming from Montreal. I arrived early at the house where the event was to take place. After depositing the materials or instruments for my performance in the home office that for the evening was turned into the coat room that soon accommodated more than just coats, I entered the living room to find other artists in the thick of preparations for their own performance.

This is not unusual. Often much of what gets used for a performance can only be brought together just before they are used, sometimes even, brought together only as they are being used, especially when the bringing together is crucial to the performative action.

I arrived at the point of their preparation when they had what I immediately recognized to be alphabet noodles scattered on the low living room table. The very same ones that I had used for my performance last year, the remainder of which we continue to eat as a kind of emergency, fast cooking meal, not because this is really part of our emergency preparations – it is now -- but simply because I had bought way more boxes than I needed.

I got introduced to the one artist I had not met before of this trio and to the fact that for that evening they were a trio. They have their own individual art practices but they are also together on a research project into performance art. In the course of this research they have decided to jointly develop collective actions, including that evening's, as part of their methodology.

I asked about the alphabet noodles, adding that I also had a performance last year involving those noodles and proceeding with a brief summary of what that performance was. In response, one of them, Anne Bérubé, then produced or wielded the bubble-bursting pin.

The use of those noodles were apparently one of her contributions to their entire performance piece that on the surface looked like disparate events but a closer reading revealed the connecting or organizing threads of play and communication.

The noodles came into play towards the end of the performance. They were organized into words contained in small resealable plastic microbags and distributed to the audience who by this time had been almost completely absorbed into the performance becoming unwitting though quite willing performers themselves.

She had been using alphabet noodles for some fifteen years now, she said, but not, so far, in the same way that you did, she added.

Bubbles don't burst halfway. But, like phantom limbs, bubbles can reappear like they did that evening when during my piece titled, 'A Musical Tribute To Housework,' I played Bach's Air in G on the classical guitar while seated in the bathtub with the water running.

10.15.09 kulturnatib

Art watched

My column last week ended with this paragraph, “In any case, they announce a switch: Art no longer the passive, pretty picture on the protected wall but the active pedestrian presence watching, measuring, judging the best and worst that we are or can be with the best or worst that we have or will produce, art and otherwise.”

So, the switch happened. Over the weekend, “ArtWatching,” more than a hundred paper cups with eyes from art works printed on paper and glued across their mouths and installed on traffic sign, traffic light posts and other public infrastructure like surveillance cameras, happened.

They watched, surveilled, listened, measured, judged. For the most part they were satisfied. They found they were, to some, like proper surveillance devices, invisible, they found interested strangers, but most satisfying of all, they found some friends; Hey, that's a Lichtenstein! That's gotta be the Mona Lisa! Warhol's Marilyn Monroe! Those eyebrows can only be Frida Kahlo! Goya? “Saturn Devouring His Son”? And so on.

For the most part what they saw was the normal run of things in a stretch of urban road in the capital, no less, of a major western country, Ottawa, Canada. It being a festival weekend, at least at this part of town, leading up to Thanksgiving Day on the Monday – not entirely the same celebration nor the same date as that of her southern neighbor though the historic impulse might be shared – and with the weather turning out to be a most agreeable in the closing days of Fall before yet another cold Winter, it was fun and merry.

People were out in droves, with children in backpacks, slings, prams, bicycles or otherwise trampling on foot. They sampled the sights, sounds, activity and, most of all though certainly not true for all, the merchandise. After all, this was the one day Giant Sidewalk Sale of shops that on regular days you would never catch a whiff of cheap from.

Yet, the GSS is simply the topping, of this extravagant annual Fall event called, as a whole, Cornucopia. If the picture of the harvest, the horn of plenty, is intentional and could be taken for shopping bags of goods to be loaded for or hoarded at home, the picture of a more insubstantial though every bit as substantive art that pervades the event is just as present though maybe not so immediately obvious.

This was especially true of the day's closing and main art event: Natural Disaster. A performance art event that promptly sold out to a packed audience of the art cognoscenti and those who could not tell spaghetti from panini artwise. Still, for both, there was the usual confounding or even confusing moments that performance art always brings on.

While way out of the range of “ArtWatching,” they knew about the event and were familiar with the history of performance art and the debates or discourses that accompanied the emergence of this art form or practice that continue to this date and to the foreseeable future. They would have been keen on it.

Still there was another part they also witnessed; mutilation, destruction, disrespect.

When we came around the following day to take down the cups some of them were gone – even some from a height that would have required a ladder or a Shaquille O'neal to get to --, some were missing the eyes, some had been crushed, ripped, discarded willynilly and not even given the decency of proper disposal in a nearby garbage bin.

Sad. But that's the life of art. Or, just life in general. You get all kinds. Even among the kind you think would know or do better.

10.08.09 kulturnatib

Art watching

For the most part and for most people, art is an object or event that is there, passively waiting to be viewed, read, listened to or otherwise consumed.

But, what if art were not so passive; Instead wears our shoes, watching, reading, listening or otherwise consuming us?

That is the question that becomes the premise or concept for my most recent installation work, a piece I had decided upon in lieu of a performance art work that was the original invitation for me to do.

This work had actually been percolating in my mind way before the invitation was extended, moving between developing detail and, as of yet at that time, the vacuum of venue.

Most of my works are site specific. The venue, space, wall or context of an exhibit or occasion for the work's display or unfolding just as important and germane as the work itself.

What began as a 'guerilla' piece not much different from graffiti that appears out of nowhere, unannounced and unacknowledged turned into this rather 'mainstream' work when looking further into the invitation and the venue, I realized this work to be a perfect fit.

And then, truth to tell, guerilla might have the radical chic appeal to it but so does the opportunity to make it 'mainstream' with some remuneration and recognition along with it. Why not?

So, informing the organizers, I submitted the proposal for this installation, regretting that the performance art piece isn't forthcoming and could be for some other time, should that be possible. No regrets, replied the organizers, we like the proposal.

The organizers are largely responsible for developing this smallish plot of Ottawa, a community called Westboro, into a cultural and commercial powerhouse – read chic, trendy, green -- known mostly for its two festivals. One in the summer, WestFest, and the other for fall, Cornucopia.

The horn of plenty then is where, once more, a plethora of art will happen along with a giant sidewalk sale on shops along a strip called Richmond Road where, except for this event, cheap is not something mentioned in the same breath.

Along this stretch as well will hang my installation piece, on traffic sign posts and other public infrastructure. These will be paper cups, more than a hundred of them, on the mouth of which are glued printed reproductions of eyes from art works known and unknown from all over the world, including one from a painting by the great Indian poet and Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, who, I was pleasantly surprised to learn when doing research for this piece, had taken up painting towards the end of his years.

They will be like surveillance cameras; Art watching. But, they can also be taken as mini-megaphones; Art silently broadcasting their ever watchful presence.

In any case, they announce a switch: Art no longer the passive, pretty picture on the protected wall but the active pedestrian presence watching, measuring, judging the best and worst that we are or can be with the best or worst that we have or will produce, art and otherwise.

10.01.09 kulturnatib

Stories

Most artists are motivated or inspired by ideas, and that is as it ideally should be. But some are moved by vision or visions. That's the shortest version of how my current project started.

The somewhat longish version goes like this; A week before 9/11, 2001, right, I was flying from New York to Boston. On the very same flight that would plow a week later into the World Trade Center. Beginning with that flight, I started to have what I can only call paranormal or anomalous experiences.

The left half of my body became numb. Not paralyzed, just numb. And then, I would say something or try to say something but other words would come out. Not the ones that I had intended to say and even thought I was saying. Same thing with writing. I was writing words that I had not intended to write. Weird. Yet, weirder still, is that these abruptly stopped when the 9/11 attacks happened. They haven't reoccured since.

I am an artist. A rather rational one, I would think. I know that artists are often called weird, but that is an everyday sort of weird. This weird is something else. It stopped me. Somehow, I was shaken. Then I realized that I have similar experiences before. At age four, I knew that my grandmother had died before my parents received the news.

I had to get to the bottom of this. I also realized that my art practice has somewhat had, in different ways and through different media, something to do with vision, sight even precognition.

But, as I said, I am quite rational. So, my current project is really a mix of art and technology that involves working with a number of university research facilities with high technology tools, instruments – 3D printing, for example, for fast prototyping – , and facilities not normally found in an artist's studio.

I have been fortunate to have accessed grants to pursue this work. This week I'm finishing paper work; technical drawings, progress report, etc., so I can get to the final phase. An exhibit, for sure, is in the horizon. I just don't know yet how it will be. The exhibit presentation, I mean.

That, interesting as it is, is not my story. I wish it was, though I don't wish for the discomfort or disorientation this must induce. It was told to me at a recent get together of artist, 'emerging artists' according to the event invitation, by the owner and main character of that story.

She really is not or no longer an 'emerging' artist but she was in the neighborhood and having missed an appointment decided to look for something that would make her having gone there less of a waste.

There, indeed, was something. This 'networking opportunity,' was organized by the Emerging Arts Professional Network and the Canadian Artists Representation – Le Front des Artistes Canadiens (CARFAC) at Gallery 101. Thus, we met, meeting other artists being compulsory, though in the guise of a 'game', and the point of the whole evening.

I am not an emerging artist either, by the particular definition of this species of artists that I had only encountered here though this species is found in many other countries and is beginning to be recognized in the Philippines as well. What's more, I believe that art, to be worth the trouble, is or should always be emerging. But that is another matter for another column.

Stories were the currency that evening. Though you still needed legal tender to buy beer, wine or bottled water. Still, you just didn't get simply stories in exchange. Though, of course, there was lot's of that.

I got a few things beyond simple stories. One with some immediately practical, if negative and confirmatory, value. With all her connections to suppliers and specialists, I asked Ms. N if it was really that difficult to source here what is decidedly -- and somewhat embarrasingly -- a low-tech material: Silkscreen.

Yes, she confirmed, adding something I already knew: It is also quite expensive. There's always the internet, she said. I know, I replied, but, incredibly, that is one story I haven't tried.

09.24.09 kulturnatib

ID2B

Last Monday, September 21, was International Day of Peace. It was also ID2B or International Day to be Bothered and to Bother. In 132 countries, at least, it was.

According to Avaaz, an international civil society and mostly cyber community pressure group, September 21 saw the actions and heard the voices of global citizens clamoring for their governments to 'wake up' and support international agreements and conventions mitigating the effects of global warming that is the subject of this weeks UN Climate Summit, the run up to the much anticipated final round of negotiations during the climate change conference in Copenhagen in December.

In Canada alone there were 198 such actions across the country. Three of these took place in the capital, Ottawa, one of which I took part of, at the grounds of Parliament.

Taking part is really just a manner of speaking. What I actually did was bringing a part. Or, better still, performing a part.

I did a performance art piece. This was a shorthand version to the piece I performed early this year at a national convention of artist run centers. The shorthand version was necessitated by the guerilla nature of the performance.

Meaning, it was not an 'official' part of the program, not in the program at all, actually, and there was an expected element of disruption although this was what could be called supportive disruption.

The piece titled, 'Bye, bye,' called attention to one of the certainties of global warming: Rising sea levels, which, just as certainly, is going to affect archipelagos and other island aggrupations as indeed it is now affecting some Pacific island groups.

The performance consisted of my wading into the group of about 60 persons who, as it happened, were listening and responding to a speech. I proceeded to randomly roll into the crowd uncapped plastic water bottles with a piece of rolled up paper in each.

The bottles didn't roll as much as skidded as it was on grass which I didn't anticipate, like I didn't one woman's reaction: “Oh, my God, plastic bottles!” To which I said, “That's just half the bad news. What's on the paper – the message in the bottle -- is worse.”

On the paper were printed facts related to global warming, rising seas and how this will adversely affect many especially in the Third World including the Philippines, which incidentally had three events for that day according to Avaaz.

While doing this I was wearing a scuba diving mask and breathing through a diving snorkel. These I continued to wear until the event was over and I had finished collecting the bottles that were left behind – just a few -- or were given back to me,“to use in a further action,” as one woman advised encouragingly.

The only time this 'costume' was interrupted was when a reporter from Radio Canada TV came around to inquire about the performance piece. “Ah, that's why the scuba gear,” she reacted. She also asked a few more questions one of which my answer to was that rising seas are doubly bad news for Filipinos of whom more than 80% do not know how to swim. That's true. Believe it or not.

For climate change, however, it is not a matter of believe it or not, but, be bothered or be more than simply bothered.

09.17.09 kulturnatib

CSA

Early last month I did a performance art piece about food. In particular, about how a morsel of industrial food takes so much more energy in planting, processing and transporting than it can ever give.

To illustrate or express this point, I pushed a large wheeled plastic garbage bin 10 kilometers from our house to the art gallery where I did a communion or eucharistic ritual. In place of the host, however, was a piece of paper board the size of a slice of loaf bread with the above mentioned thought about industrial food printed on it.

This wasteful reality is, among other things, fueling the growing food revolution here and in other countries that in many ways marches under the banner of CSA or community supported agriculture.

Last weekend was a celebration of this movement with many member farms of the farmer's union or the Union des Producteurs Agricoles opening their farm gates to friends, visitors and subscribers.

We visited Le Vallon des Sources, about an hour's drive west from us named so because it is tucked in a small valley where there are some clear springs.

It is this farm that, since February, we have subscribed to, though we picked up our first basket only in May. Our subscription consists of a box of freshly harvested organic seasonal vegetables delivered weekly to a central location from where, in turn, we pick it up.

Our subscription, or partnership with the farmers, Michel Massuard and Monique Laroche, along with many other families and individuals signified through, though not solely, an amount we pay upfront covers for our part or share of the harvest of the entire spring and summer growing season.

For the farmers, it frees them from the uncertainties of the 'market,' sharing the inherent risks of farming thus allowing them to plan the growing season better and with more variety through farming methods that are ecologically sustainable leading to much less waste and a healthier environment, on the earth and hearth.

For us we get fresh vegetables – usually harvested in the morning of the delivery – from a certified organic farm. Though we normally don't get advance notice of the particular contents of the box, except through the seasonal guides or through the farm's website and regular email messages, we're always in for a surprise.

Our last box contained a head of Romanesco Cauliflower which can easily be mistaken for an ornamental plant with its beautiful Fibonacci spiral structure mirrored down to its smallest florette. Though not tasting as elaborate as its looks it provides an interestingly textured spin to any salad.

The farm was I had imagined it, though better. Instead of the monotonous monocultures of industrial farms it was an alternating patchwork of vegetable strips that, at the time of our visit, were mostly harvest ready. There were some greenhouses, one bulging with ripening tomatoes. Irrigation hoses snaked across the planted and crop ready strips. There were farm machinery that, while looking their age – no gps navigated, satellite data fed equipment here -- , also looked as homey as the rest of the farm including the clutch of free range chicken and some rabbits.

After the vegetarian lunch there was a game to test our knowledge of vegetables through identifying their leaves. I opted out of that game. I wanted to enhance the hands-on knowledge of our toddler who just a few weeks back had her first close encounter with farm animals though this was on a more controlled environment of an agricultural museum.

Our hands-on knowledge was enhanced as well. But this was mostly on the social and solidarity level, like meeting with similarly minded consumers, individuals and families, and agricultural producers, a community, in short, who shared the same concerns for healthy living and the desire to act on those concerns.

09.10.09 kulturnatib

Hot-air story

Hot-air balloons have never landed in nor taken off from Cebu City. I don't believe so. Yet, like everybody else who watches TV, movies, reads newspapers, magazines or books, I have had but a glimsing familiarity with these gracefully ponderous aerial giants.

Until my first visit here (Canada) in 2006, that is. When I learned that there was a local annual hot-air balloon festival and it took place during the time of my visit, I naturally and excitedly welcomed the chance to upgrade this familiarity to, perhaps, friendship.

To start off I learned these balloons' real names: Montgolfieres, from the Montgolfiere brothers, French siblings who pioneered this mode and method of flight when all there was to get by was ideas and drawings of Leonardo da Vinci.

That event came and went, as I did. Then, the closest I got to these balloons was half a kilometer away when a few of them got as far as getting fully inflated but not much more nor farther than that as the early morning winds strongly advised against their taking off.

Of course, before then, I had had a few sightings of them aloft from our apartment window. Taken all in all it seemed to be a fruitful enough introduction.

Last weekend, it was the Festival des Montgolfieres once more. I was back, so were they. But, I am no longer a visitor but a resident. And, no longer in an apartment but in a house not far from the base site of the festival and next door to a park.

It was the last day of the festival. On TV we saw them take off for the last time. We looked out the window and, indeed, there they were. They had taken to the clear, cloudless late summer sky; Clumps of blazing color against a brilliant blue.

We took to the street on our way to the park to get a better view. Especially for our daughter who, just learning to speak, does not yet make the fine distinction between the ball played with on the ground and the ball many times bigger that flies or floats in the air since in French they can both be called the same word; Ball.

Outside there were enough of them to have one go; there, there, there and there some more!

But then, look there! Hey, it's coming down! It's going to hit the houses! It's headed for the park! Mon Dieu, it's huge!

And you could hear the jets of flame roaring and hissing to heat up the air inside the balloon that gives it its better known english name and makes it fly. But this time and with this one it didn't seem to heat the air enough. Instead of flying it was headed down to what could only be a non-scheduled touchdown.

Non-scheduled it might have been but not entirely undesignated, as I learned later. Our park is a designated landing zone that lies in the periphery of the Gatineau Park, a bigger, more densely forested park where a landing is, at the very least, a messy and entangling proposition.

So, the Mongolfiere with the markings of Abitibi Bowater, a forest products company, paid us, our park, a visit, dropping in on the few kids who were playing basketball, soccer, simply running around or hanging out.

The bigger among them were hastily commandeered to help keep the balloon grounded since it still had enough hot air to lift it but not enough to clear the houses or the trees and it didn't have the traditional sandbag ballasts or weights while the pilot frantically called to his pursuit crew on his two way radio for assistance and eventual extraction.

Before the crew arrived, came the pleasantly surprised residents surrounding the park and their super excited children who wanted to meet this most unexpected visitor up close. They peppered the pilot with questions, who had a few of his own: Where are we? Which road is that?

A young boy, in particular asked: “How much to get on?” “Two hundred plus dollars,” the woman he asked answered who happened to be one of the, probably paying, passengers on the balloon. “That much for an hour?”, the boy persisted. “For a few minutes,” was the wry reply, as the balloon was finally wrestled to the ground by adults to whom the pilot gave more complicated instructions for this maneuver.

The balloon looked like an exhausted prehistoric bird slumped on the ground. But, still good looking enough for the rare photo op.

The pursuit crew finally arrived. They dismantled the whole gear which didn't look to be more complicated nor having more parts than an ordinary propane powered bicycle. The balloon itself, for sure as big or bigger than 20 by 20 meters when fully inflated was folded and stuffed into a bag just one meter cube.

As I started walking back to the house the pilot was handing out plastic cups of bubblies for a successful if not entirely completed flight and for sure for launching hot air stories that is certainly amazing and entirely true.

05.28.09 kulturnatib

Bugs

“You speak French?” That this was asked in English betrayed a bet that, one, I probably don't speak French and, two, that I would be more familiar with English. “Un petit peu,” I replied, “but better with English,” I added.

There was another bet that had nothing to do with either French or English but rather with what might have looked to be like I was a newbie at this.

“That one, problem.” This was followed by shaking and scratching motions. “Plenty of animals.” “No, no, what is it?” This was exactly my question that I had no opportunity to verbalize as soon as he started talking to me. “Bugs, yes, bugs. That one. You use it?”

I followed where his finger was pointing and immediately realized what he was getting at. It was my turn for some shaking motion. I shook my head.

But, yes, that would have plenty of bugs. Even indoors they are bug borough. Outdoors, they are a veritable bugsville. Not only that, they are extremely attractive to bigger animals, including humans, whom I was, not surprisingly, mistaken to be among them.

Yet, no, I was not interested in in the faux leather couch that had clearly seen better days but could still pull through decently given some methodical touching up.
It was among the pile of furniture that had been left out on the curbside for the following day's scheduled pickup by the city's garbage service. Or, as often happens, for picking by anybody interested in them on a strictly first come, first claim and finders-keepers basis.

My interests were more modest. Besides how could I move that full, three-person couch, even if it was just two corners away from our house?

I was working on a project that needed cabinet drawer rails or slides. The junked bedroom cabinet next to the couch had those. Perfect.

So, with tool in hand, I was in the process of harvesting those accessories when this man on a bicycle stopped and, in what I can only see as expressing civic concern and social solidarity, proceeded to give me some advice on the fine art of trash picking.

Not that I needed such advice. Ever since I had, and for some time now, adopted the approach of extending the useful life of something by either simply using it some more or reusing it or using it for something else, trash has been some of my most reliable and readily available resources.

Even the use of 'found-objects' in many of my art works is a manifestation of this approach.

It just makes simple sense for me. With the pollution that is choking up the earth, ourselves and our future anything that helps to mitigate the situation helps.

This was not the immediate concern for the man on the bike, however. “Bugs, they itch much” he continued even after I had told him that the couch was not my interest. “You have to wash plenty,” he persisted. “So sometimes not worth it.”

“I know,” I said and wishing him a nice evening as he hopped back on his bike and as I hopped on mine with the success of my project in the bag.

04.23.09 kulturnatib

Culture and chance

Many governments who find that taxes are not a popular thing, especially governments with leaders who treat the tax coffers as if it were their personal piggy banks, find other ways to pry money from the hands of passively unwilling or actively resistant citizens.

The most trod avenue is the highway to the casino, or some form of either state managed or state sanctioned game of chance.

Even the church, normally the most vocal against this most addictive of sins, is not above dipping its holy hands into gambling revenues or not being too particular about the provenance of such money when some is thrown its way.

It's for some good, they say; government, church and, naturally, the gamblers themselves.

What that good is varies widely though they usually reflect the socio-economic priorities or realities of a particular government or country.

Thus, in our country, most of the money from legal gambling goes to disaster relief or emergency aid, health support and, not very prominently acknowledged, political projects of the President although even disaster relief and health support is often positioned to become political 'pogi' points for the administration in power.

Here, the most prominent positive face of gambling is cultural support, through Loto-Québec's various cultural support programs.

Ten years after its establishment in 1969 – 178 years after legalized gambling was established in the Philippines – Loto-Québec, after much deliberation and determination by the directors, decided to adopt the vision of supporting contemporary Québec art as part of its mission, importantly earmarking 1/100th of 1% of gross sales for art acquisitions.

Thirty years later, this collection has blossomed into over 4,000 works by more than 1,000 artists from all over Québec, representing one of the biggest and most diverse corporate art collections in Canada. 50 of these are currently being toured all over the province.

We caught this exhibit entitled, 'Nomade,' at its first stop here at the Galerie Montcalm of the city hall of Gatineau City.

As expected, the works were uniformly excellent in a variety of media and genres. Expectedly, too, for a traveling exhibit, they were mostly wall works of easily transportable sizes.

Of these what caught my attention was a figurative abstract in acrylic on shaped canvas by Kittie Bruneau. It wasn't the work itself, although this was mostly in eye-riveting bright reds, yellows and oranges, but the title.

Here is one of art's deep mysteries; the titling of a work, “Untitled.” Yet, in this case, the artist wasn't content to simply leave it at that, appending, though parenthetically, the name of a place that as far as I know can only be in the Philippines: Tondo.

The accompanying text to the work did not throw light into why this work was titled such. I was left with searching, though reluctantly yet unavoidably, into visual clues that could tie the work with the title suspecting at the same time that this could not, in all likelihood, be the intention of the artist.

Still, it got me thinking about the strange serendipities or coincidences of chance that a work probably inspired by what is certainly not the most picturesque of places in the Philippines ends up in the art collection of a corporation that traffics in chance thousands of kilometers away with a mandate that is a world of difference in how the smile of lady luck gets to be appreciated.

03.19.09 kulturnatib

Consuming art

I was just on the phone with an art supplier. They are five hours away by car. One would think that here, for a major city – Canada's capital, no less -- art supplies should not be difficult to come by.

They, actually, are not. The major art suppliers do have branch stores here as do some of the more specialized, non-Mall shops.

But what I need is not what is considered a traditional art supply. In this sense it is specialized. Yet, in the usual sense it is rather common; wherever there are Chinese or Asian restaurants or groceries, which there are quite a number here even if the local Chinatown is not as big or as prominent as in other major metropolis.

Still, what I'm looking for is to have this common after-meal delicacy customized to make it a component, a major one, of an art work for an upcoming exhibit.

I'm looking for custom-made fortune cookies or to have custom fortune cookies made.

They will be part of an installation/performance art piece that is my contribution to an exhibit called Transcontinental Divide.

The installation will be some kind of Zen Buddhist altar and the performance will be by the guests to or viewers of the show who will be encouraged to partake of the cookies that will be served in the altar in order for them to fully appreciate the artwork.

The more perceptive amongst you will immediately realize that fully appreciating the work crucially involves getting into the cookie, breaking it open perhaps, and retrieving the slip of paper that will contain one's fortune or its directions for realizing the same.

Except that this will not be regular fortunes. Thus the need for customizing. They will be koan like directions. There is neither space nor time here to get into what koans are except to say that they are riddle-like sayings used in Zen Buddhism to aid in attaining enlightenment.

Yet, they are not riddles in the usual logical-rational sense. They, indeed, appear nonsensical. But they are supposed to lead to the instantaneous, intuitive grasp of non-dual reality.

At least that's what I take these directions to be though a Zen Buddhist might legitimately beg to disagree.

They are provided by an artist in Vancouver, our counterpart in this exchange exhibit, whose idea or intentions for the artwork we are at complete liberty to interpret or implement the way we understand them to be. We are, in fact, as free as to reject entirely the other artist's idea or directions and come up with our own artwork provided that it refers to the rejection.

That is not an option for me. Rejection is not necessary. In fact, as soon as I saw (the text wasn't just simple letters but had a visual or graphic design element to it) or read the instructions, I immediately knew what to do. The rest of the work is a matter of a little tweaking here and there.

This work is about the consumption of art, of how it is to consume art, of how art can even be art at all. These are some of the knotty questions that bedevil art and artists today and ever since art has been accorded its very own soapbox.

Eating is a very basic if primitive form of consumption. It is also high art. I have no problem with both. Like cake, I can have art and eat it, too. Only this time it won't be cake but cookies.

03.12.09 kulturnatib

Picture imperfect

As soon as I saw the picture -- half a page of one page and a quarter of the next page -- of a middle aged woman looking away from the camera into space that must be as wide as hope and deep as despair, I knew I was looking at a Pinay.

It is a single picture. But there is a one inch space – gutter margin on two separate but adjacent pages that are not contiguous – that slices it in two unequal halves.

This margin is not necessary. The picture could have been bled up to the folding line of both pages maintaining pictorial integrity.

But pictorial integrity is hardly what this picture and the story it tells is about.

The bigger half is taken up by the torso of Julia Evangelista. The smaller half, immediately behind and to her left that the tight focal point of the camera already blurs a bit, shows snapshots of her life pinned up on a board. She is not in any of them, but she is all over them, in her children – during graduation – , her family and friends and, perhaps, a grandchild or two.

In the presentation of this picture an inch separates both halves. In truth, both are several thousand kilometers apart betrayed only by Julia's far-away look that fixes a deeper truth of necessary separation made more heart rending by unnecessary cruelty especially in the hands of people so educated.

Hell is how the accompanying article in the Montreal-published French newspaper, La Presse, calls it.

With my somewhat shaky command of French, this is what I was able to piece together of Julia's story. She arrived in Montreal in 1996 on a tourist visa. She found live-in domestic work with a Kuwaiti couple, both medical doctors, who then keeps her passport and for the next ten years keeps her in servitude working daily, without breaks or holidays, from 6am till 11pm. She was not allowed the regular wherewithals of a normal life, access to the city's shopping centers, cinemas, banks, transportation system, etc.

Still with her measly 280Can$ monthly salary she was able to send her four children, who she has not seen in more than a decade, through university.

Had it not been for an almost one-way trip to heaven facilitated by a cerebral stroke in 2006 hell would have been forever for her. Actually hell lasted a bit longer. When she was literally felled by the stroke, sending her tumbling down the stairs, she had to wait for four hours before she was taken to the hospital, in favor of the children being taken to the day-care center.

The stroke half-paralyzed her but fully freed her. Her story was out. Her employers were prosecuted. They plead guilty. They were made to pay 4,000Can$ to an organization that defended immigrants rights. They also had to organize information sessions especially among their compatriots on the importance of respecting the laws of Canada.

There is no mention in the article of Julia being paid anything.

But it must have been payment enough for her to be freed from virtual slavery conditions, to reclaim a normal life, to find work on a regular job, after recuperating from her stroke and her ordeal.

It was a stroke of luck that many, mostly Pinays in similar situations, are banking on. Here, where Pinays make up the majority of domestic helpers and caregivers, and in the Philippines, where many are all too willing to risk falling into dire straits brought on by exploitation and deprivation.

03.05.09 kulturnatib

Open letter to XO?

A vacation is always thought of as a trip away from the familiar, everyday routine – drudgery, if you will – to an exotic location or even familiar locale sans work, house and office, with its attendant chores and obligations.

Our recent vacation was like that. Yet, it was, for me especially, also a return to the familiar work, chores and obligations that characterizes any art activity. In particular, a performance art event.

Thanks to you, XO?, who I'm sure won't mind not being named here in person since many of you have already made a name for yourselves individually to the point where the mention of your names brings on appreciative nods while that of XO? incredulous stares that wonder if artists are all such incorrigible alcoholics that they need to talk about intoxicants all the time.

Yes, you were able to organize two performance art events in as many weeks. Or, even less. And, in venues that reflect the continuing dominance of the youth market as the engine for the fast, furious and futilely unplanned urbanization of Cebu City. Moreover, they seemed to lend credence to some observation that the worldwide economic meltdown has yet to lick our shores.

The first, at Mango One, during the day of hearts. It was guerilla performance at its best. So far. I say this from the stand point of that being my first performance at said venue where, true to forewarnings, I found the audience to be the most heterogeneous and art-innocent yet at the same time certainly the most art-curious of all the audiences I've performed for there and here.

Russ Ligtas's performance was as stand out. Gay caricature is standard if usually tasteless fare in the city's menu of cultural offerings particularly for a day like February 14. But, Russ's performance art piece grabbed this caricature by the balls – pardon my French – and dazzled the audience with its unflinching, in-your-face honesty that I believe many there understood to be more about our addictions (loves, if you want to be cute) and less about gayness, straightness or whatever-else-ness.

The second event was at a more familiar venue. The audience, too, was more homogeneous, art savvy in both appreciation and practice. It was more intimate. As such, I was more relaxed, less wired for the minor to killer disasters that one prepares for with unpredictable success with an unfamiliar audience.

Yet, disaster struck. Almost. Not from the audience but from a fellow performance artist.

As I watched breathless, certain that all I was going to be left at best with was cleaning after the wreckage, that of my own performance particularly, the word 'spontaneity' came around to haunt me.

As I have often maintained, one of the most attractive element, for me, with performance art is the possibility or even the demands of spontaneity. A performance art piece can only be prepared, rehearsed, planned for up to a certain point. Beyond this is the slippery slope of spontaneity where nothing succeeds like success and flops like a soaked tissue.

Yet, it has to be spontaneity with a respect for some basic boundaries. My stuff is mine and yours is yours and make sure which is which.

I didn't mind much that a crucially important prop for my performance made an early appearance ahead of me without my permission. It was grabbed by this co-performance artist in a dance that had no business with my prop and vice-versa except for the simple, spontaneous fact that it was easily at hand.

Thank God non of the delicate release mechanism in the prop was dislodged or in any way rendered inoperable. That it didn't operate as well as planned when I did my piece is another matter that has nothing to do with the violation.

Yet, it could have ended otherwise. Badly. Then this letter would have been unnecessary. My point would have been made more directly, more immediately, there and then.

Still, this point wouldn't and shouldn't be lost for all that and even for the potential worse of that: You are doing a wonderful job, a real cultural service to the community whose archaic conservatism often trips or traps the long heralded march towards openness and modernity.

Padayon! I look forward to even bigger events with you.

02.26.09 kulturnatib

Contemporganic

Too many things these days are not much better than just buzz words. Buzz words to begin with become so because they, at the very least, sound good. They create a buzz. Yet, in the end, they become many things for many people and not all of them meaning the same thing.

Organic is one of these words.

So, when the other weekend Joey Ayala came along as chairperson of the committee on music of the National Commission of Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and organizing a four-venue national musical tour for the arts month called, 'Organik Musik,' I imagined not a few eyebrows going vertical.

Knowing Joey somewhat, I had an inkling what this was about.

Looking at the lineup of bands, performers and participants of the events in Baguio, Cebu, Davao and Manila confirmed my hunch that Joey was continuing on a much larger scale and wider scope his personal musical journey forwards and outwards by digging into his personal and cultural roots.

This in essence is what contemporary art is about; The bridging of the past and future in whatever media that presents a dynamic of form and content which speaks with immediacy in the present tense.

Thus did SM City Cebu Activity Center experience a rare hybrid of musical and literary genres seldom seen there, where, as can be imagined with one of the bulwarks of Philippine Malldom, kitsch rules and karaoke culture is king.

Here, as with the other cities in the tour, a band is the pivot of the program, presenting the idea of music as a distillation and inspiration of other artistic forms, notably literature both oral and written, and dance.

Errol 'Budoy' Marabiles and Junior Kilat were the inescapable choice for this role for the Visayan leg of this tour.

Not only has Budoy become immensely popular, he remains so. He has also achieved this with his artistic integrity intact and his uncompromising artistic vision shared, understood and appreciated by a generation for whom history would otherwise be just a bunch of dusty, tattered and, to add injury to insult, mistake filled textbooks.

Providing further depth to the event where the poetry of Bathalad, the dances of the UP Cebu Upstage, the sidays of the Warays and the balitaw of a family from Carcar – a couple, the two poetic protagonists and their son who played the guitar.

Understandably, the poetry numbers suffered from the struggle it continues to wage with an audience that is weaned on spectacle, on noise, on the 'star syndrome.' They had to compete with the ambient sounds that makes a mall one gigantic noise generating machine.

Also, they had to fight for attention from people who are there precisely to escape from having to pay close attention yet remain 'entertained' just the same for their non-effort.

Yet, Bathalad rose to the occasion. The 'Habal-habal' duet by Adonis Durado and Karla Quimsing were an exemplary hit. Rightly so, as habal-habal, in all its usage but especially so as a mode of transportation, is rife with layers and layers of meaning, context, drama, pathos and sheer Bisayan joie de vivre.

The sidays were the weak link here. Not for the lack of talent from their performers, but the simple minority of those present who understood waray.

Yet, Budoy is Waray, from Law-ang, Northern Samar. Here, he showed the extent to which he imbues 'Visayaness,' in that when he speaks or sings in Waray it doesn't matter that you don't understand exactly but you somehow feel you know what he means.

In the same manner, one does not know exactly what organic in the context of this series of connected cultural events mean. Yet, one feels that it is about you and me as a people in a nation, the same yet different in a world where homogeneity is supposed to be a virtue called globalization.

Another buzz word.

02.19.09 kulturnatib

Going home coming

For most of us, between coming and going is home. Yet, for a growing number of us, as well, at both ends of coming and going is also home. Or, are also homes.

The question then of where exactly is home in this situation is answered only with many hmmms, aahhhs or interminable silence. And then, often, depending on who is asking or the context of the conversion at which this question squeezes itself in.

This is a question that has occurred to me in the past few days. I have come home for three weeks and very soon will be headed back towards my adoptive home.

Home is, of course, more than just an address or a spot in a Google map.

Before we left for this vacation, the artistic group I have joined – among the foundations of the artistic home I have started to build -- was going to have its first regular performance event for this year.

Several times last year I had been invited to join in these regular events but circumstances had always intervened that made joining just impossible, though there have been other events not organized by the group but participated in mostly by them that I was able to join. This time around, the same thing is happening.

But, I told them not to worry. I really won't be missing much. I was headed home to my original group, quite different but at the same time rather similar, who made sure that a performance event was going to be a highlight of our vacation itinerary.

As it happens, it will now be two performance events.

The first one was last Valentine's Day at Mango One that even on a regular weekend with its crush of young, curious and appreciative crowd lends itself to the kind of guerilla performance that the group, XO?, is slowly but surely getting known for around town.

I joined the stalwarts of the group, Chai Fonacier, Russ Ligtas and Raymund Fernandez with my own performance for an event that surely made an otherwise ordinarily special night an extraordinarily memorable one especially for those whose idea for that night didn't go far beyond chocolates and red roses.

The next event will be tonight. It will be at the Handuraw Cafe at Gorordo Avenue, Lahug. The same quartet who performed at the event last Saturday will be joined by Winston Rellosa with his merry band of musicians.

The theme for the evening is, “Going Home Coming.” It will be a 'despedida' event. But, it could be seen also as a 'bienvenida' performance, to welcome continuing performances for XO? here and for Fait Maison in Quebec.

More than that it could also be taken as a further encouragement for bigger, more ambitious dreams that include a possible collaboration for both groups in a performance art festival some time in the near future.

When that takes place, there can be no possible confusion as to what or where home is. They will all come together somewhere at the center of heart.

And, of art.

2.08.09 mendoza exhibit review

As many of you know I also write exhibit reviews. Below is my first for this year.


A long stretch
Whether one dreams in color or black and white is a question that is often asked.

From artists you would expect that the answer would be the former since color is simply or expectedly part of the immediate range of an artist's vocabulary.

But not necessarily with all artists.

In his thesis exhibit, 'Odyssey,' currently on show at the Cafe Capriccio, graduating UP Fine Arts student, Ramon Carlo 'Caloy' Mendoza hints that he is an exception.

This is not to say, however, that his works are devoid of color. To the contrary, many of his works do have color. But they play a secondary, layer determining or enhancing role, although having a more varied spectral dimension color does, in some of the works where they are present, tend to overstep this role.

Nonetheless, the stellar billing still belongs to images which are in stark, non-gradiated black renditions.

These images, sourced from pictures, illustrations or drawings bear the second exceptional feature in this show. They are not painted images in the traditional sense. They are processed, edited, manipulated using the tool that is now ubiquitous with many artists: the computer and its concomitant software.

Immediately, this raises the stylistic banner of pop art which is, indeed, acknowledged by Mendoza.

While the pioneering work of Warhol, Johns and others set the discourse for pop art in both the elevation of popular, mostly consumer imagery – product labels -- to a level approaching that of the 'fine' bourgeoisie hagiography of traditional painting and the utilization of media that lent itself to mass production – silk screen printing, for example – Mendoza leans on the diffusive possibilities of digital imaging and processes.

And for image content Mendoza is less obliged to pay tribute to the consumerist crowning of the original pop art. Instead, there is a movement towards an ironic nod or frank acceptance of the banality of everyday life.

Again, while in Warhol and Johns – more with Warhol than Johns – the consumer product is presented in bare minimalist fashion, although repeated ad infinitum, the layering remains flat and determinedly on the surface, Mendoza's layers have highly wrought yet decorative functions that highlight not so much a minimalist as an emptimalist core.

In this, Mendoza is right in step with the times, especially youth techno-gadgetry culture that ostensibly celebrates digital connection yet somehow is at a loss on what to do with connectiveness. Or how to achieve and maintain it.

On the technical level, the layering is done in the most painterly way. There is, of course, the pigment of paint – the use of which tend to be confused or slapdash and takes on the quality of wallpaper -- but more in keeping with Mendoza's method, it is the vehicle of paint – here, glue – that allows for physical layers of images on paper one of top of the other.

The works where such layering is most pronounced, which, in the nature of this technique, makes it the most subtle, coupled with a restrained use of images are those that come out as most attractive or most able to afford the possibility of deeper discourse.

Yet, for the most part, deeper discourse is elusive with these works. Not least because Mendoza in his exhibit statement – unfortunately just read during the opening and not made readily available to the public-- opts to stay within the comfort zone of technical explanations and gives precious little about content.

However, such absence does not prevent the works from presenting an interesting departure from the image generation of traditional painting. In many works – though one is at a loss to explain the variety of sizes – the various visual and textural elements brought on by layering comes together to make these pieces feel just right.

Even with these, a walk would be more than enough and an odyssey is a long stretch.

01.29.09 kulturnatib

A cup of sea
When in his last column, Raymund Fernandez, wrote about his mother reminding him to always make it or find his way home, I was reminded of my own mother.

She knows that home now is a different, far away address for me and she will want, pray even, for me to always make it to this home.

Yet, she was overjoyed when, just before Christmas, I told her that we were going to be home soon for a visit.

So the past week or so has been spent preparing for this visit, that includes winging across the Pacific with a child too young to have worked out the mechanics of walking yet old enough to try and launch her own flights of fancy. Or, daredevilry, more like.

This is challenging enough without having to also prepare for an exhibit that, by the time the visit is over, will have the preparation window of opportunity open for just a little under two months.

There is more. The exhibit – two simultaneous exhibits actually – is an undertaking of two artist run centers in Vancouver and Ottawa. The idea of the exhibit is to pair artist from both centers – 5 each – with each preparing a concept for a piece that the other of the pair will execute and vice-versa.

And, still more. The parameters, from the curators of the exhibit, state: The artists in this exhibition do not know one another and consequently cannot have a sense of how the artist that receives their instructions will respond. They are not necessarily collaborating, but instead releasing the idea for a work whose production is entirely out of their hands.

This is a double challenge multiplied many times over. There is, first, the blank sheet of the starting point for the initial piece whose end point can only be suggested or hoped for. Then, second, there is the filled up sheet whose final result is far from straightforward.

In fact, the curators allow for one of the pair – or even both -- rejecting the concept of the other but he or she must nevertheless produce a work that will give evidence of this rejection.

So, after many conceptual misses over the course of as many days, a hit. Or, so I hope.

The concept calls for a sculpture/installation entitled, 'A Cup of Sea.'

It states: A cup of tea is a social occasion for many, particularly in Asia. Yet it is also an occasion for personal reflection, inward and outward. While there are many ingredients for tea, the single indispensable ingredient that draws out the contribution of all the other ingredients is water; hot, preferably just before boiling water.

Water is, of course, the one ingredient that makes life as we know it possible. We are surrounded by, even constituted of water. The great Pacific Ocean is home to many. Humans as well as other creatures.

My birth and adopted homes are connected through the Manila-Vancouver route that arcs over the Pacific. Like water in general and the oceans and seas in particular, there are many threats and challenges to it or to them that impact on humans and other creatures. There is, now more than ever, a need for reflection on and about our cup of sea. The artwork is a contribution to or an invitation to such reflection.

While working out the possible elements to the work I came upon a fact that can only be considered serendipitous; Cebu City and Vancouver are close to being exactly positioned opposite each other on the globe.

Both lie close to longitude 123° though Vancouver is further north in latitude by more than 30°.

There are many things that can be said about this. The one I prefer is that with this exhibit I can't be too far from home in both art and life.

01.22.09 kulturnatib

It is not often that I am this early for my column. This isn't scheduled for publication until the 22nd, next Thursday. But, I just had to write this after reading Raymund Fernandez's column that lately he now sends me. He has yet to set up something like this blog and I did not long ago subscribe to his RSS in CDN online. As I have said before, this is one of the advantages of being subscribed to this blog. You get my columns earlier than the published version, though, I would still encourage you, once again, to buy the paper. If you can. And then, as always, I won't mind hearing from you. Salamat.


Where heart takes you
Raymund Fernandez's latest column about Ed Alegre's passing on saddened me. But it also filled me with wonder and amazement at how circles or ripples of circumstance overlap or flow into each other connecting our often distant and disparate lives together forming bonds that loosen or tighten depending on our current situations and dispositions.

Last Saturday my wife and I were at a memorial service. We hardly knew the person being memorialized. We began to know him only when he was well on his way to succumbing to cancer. Even then, it was knowing only about the bare facts about him.

The barest of which is that he is the father of a friend. The senior to our friend, the junior, who we didn't know to be so until his father's name in the funerary directory led us to where the memorial service was to take place.

Here, as in most of North America, seniors and juniors are usually not part of the legal nor even common name. Especially with the juniors, unlike the way it is with us where Jun is a most common name or nickname which then gets confused with, mistaken for or mistakenly substituted for June or other similar sounding nomenclature.

Our friend's name, as it happens, is a perfect set-up for such confusion, if he were Filipino or a full-blooded one. Or when he is the Philippines.

Jean was my immediate boss when we worked together in Riyadh many years ago. We forged a friendship beyond work that was unusual if unremarkable were it not for the strict though not openly acknowledged work or professional hierarchies there that had the whites mostly at the top, the Filipinos somewhere in the middle, and the South Asians – Bangladeshis, mostly – at the bottom.

This, thanks to Jean who initiated the breaking down of this barrier which we, particularly in the art section, reciprocated by 'adopting' the Bangladeshi gopher – officially, tea boy -- assigned to us.

Even after deciding not to renew my contract our friendship continued especially with Jean paying me – or the Philippines – a visit soon after I returned home.

It was one ripple in that visit that interacted with a ripple mentioned in Raymund's column that in turn propagated other ripples that connect Ed Alegre, however peripherally, with Jean's father.

In that column Raymund mentions Tabo, this cultural project he worked directly, among others, with Ed's wife, Joycie. After the launch in Tacloban, the project moved to Iloilo, then Cebu.

In Cebu, it took place in a not quite dilapidated warehouse. A perfect venue for what was a mishmash of artistic expressions including a musical one that saw myself being dragged into playing the electric guitar with an impromptu band whose self-appointed leader – who owned the instruments and the warehouse – just gave me the barest idea of what to play while handing me the guitar.

Three chord reggae, he said then proceeded, on the keyboards, to play the wildest electronoize south of Kraftwerk or Krautrock.

I'm not sure the impression this made on Jean who I invited to this event thinking to give him a taste of the emerging Bisayan culture. I know though that he was thoroughly taken by this girl, a student of Raymund and by then my close friend as well, who was also present looking more bemused than confused at our attempts at music.

Jean and Renzi have since been inseparable, made even more so with, now, two boys, the eldest for whom during his baptism both Raymund and myself stood as godfathers.

Raymund ends his column with a lesson he learned from Ed: It is a wise man who travels only to where his heart takes him.

Surely, this applies to Jean. And if I might be so bold, myself as well. That's why I now live in the same country and province as Jean, just a few blocks away from where his father used to live and only ripples away from friends like Raymund in this ever expanding and inclusive circles of life. And, even, death.

01.15.09 kulturnatib

Geophagy
One of the the characters in Gabriel García Márquez's 'A Thousand Years of Solitude' is Rebeca.

Among her memorable traits or quirks that is supposed to be among the contributors to the 'magic' in the magic realism of this book and the general writing style of Marquez is that she eats earth or soil.

In an address to a group of writers, Marquez said that while his most popular works have been labeled magic realism it is really just simple, everyday realism he writes about. He cited letters he has received from all over the world about personal testimony to events in his books that has really happened to them or to other people, soil eating among them.

Technically this is called geophagy and is indeed being resorted to by a growing number of people. It is, however, not so much magic as it is tragic.

The newspaper we get everyday is running a series on the worldwide food crises. There are the grim statistics, graphs, pictures, illustrations, analyses, feature stories, etc., that make for an interesting and pleasant (visually, at least) read – the subject is dire enough, why not make it a bit more palatable?

One of the feature stories immediately caught my attention, reminding me of Rebeca. Only this time it wasn't just about an individual but groups of people or entire communities.

A search later in the internet revealed that this story has been carried by most major newspapers and news organizations worldwide. Yet for the paper we subscribe to and for most people here the feature could have a special resonance or point of empathy as the country in the story is francophone, a country where French or some version of it is the lingua franca.

Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. Alongside crushing poverty is widespread hunger made even worse by the international food crises that has seen food imports becoming more expensive. This led to food riots last summer and the eventual fall of the government.

The poor in Haiti have now resorted more and more to eating soil or clay. Galettes d'argile, they are called or clay cookies.

While clay is the main ingredient which gives it its mostly yellowish hue making them look like regular cookies, they also contains salt and vegetable shortening, which make it a bit more expensive than free but way more affordable than the imported staples.

These are considered one of Haiti's traditional remedies mostly for pregnant women and children. A source of calcium for the former and an antacid for the latter.

Still, the health impact of this food is under scrutiny – Gerald Callahan, an immunology professor at Colorado State University who has studied geophagy suggests that dirt can also strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb to certain diseases – yet, it is widely accepted that relying on this alone can lead to serious malnutrition.

An accompanying whole page infographic showed the extent of the world wide food crises. In absolute numbers, Asia – with India and China in the lead – is experiencing the most critical situations of hunger.

The Philippines doesn't figure in this map. Not yet. It doesn't mean that there is no hunger in the Philippines. It just hasn't reached critical levels.

But given the continuing and increasing obsession of the Arroyo government with changing the constitution, the continuing scandals in almost all branches of government, the deepening international economic crisis, the tipping point might come sooner than later.

Then we will have our own version of creative cuisine. The ingredients could be different and dirt cheap won't probably have dirt in it, but just the same it will be desperate.

01.08.09 kulturnatib

Prediction
Fortune, like luck, can be either good or bad. A credible fortune teller will reveal both. Maybe not in equal doses, although depending on the inquirer's disposition, either one could be taken to weigh heavier than the other.

This teller could then be expensive. Or, entirely free. And even fun, in cases where the fortune predicted is neither about one's self, family, someone close or someone in the immediate neighborhood.

That was what we -- myself with my wife's family – were after most while counting down the minutes towards the just ushered in new year.

Fun, yes but without the frivolity. Serious fun, if that doesn't sound oxymoronic.

Proof of this are the printed forms that were passed around for us to fill up with our predictions. In the end though, one person became the involuntary secretary, who wrote down the predictions as they were contributed, questioned or agreed with.

At first it was a free for all with no apparent rhymn nor particular reason, except that, as expected, they hewed close to the interests or current preoccupations of the contributors; The father about provincial and national politics, the brothers about technology, etc.

Fun as it was, I wasn't really into it. First, I was occupied with the computer, finishing a collaborative gift for our friends. This was an extension of the DIY (do-it-yourself) Christmas gift exchange we initiated for the immediate family under the banner, “Joyeuses Faites.” And part of our general desire for this year to buy less, by more.

This banner was a play on the usual holiday greetings here, which is, Joyeuses Fetes. Or, Happy Holidays. With our banner, it means, literally, Happy Makings or, as we preferred, Happy Creatings.

Second, as the immediately preceding paragraphs might have clued some of you in, the proceedings were done almost entirely in French. Quebecois French to be exact. Exactly the language that, despite recent formal schooling – interrupted though, I still manage to only stumble through.

Despite this, I did manage to chime in every now and then, predicting, for example, that the Chinese would beat everybody else at mass-producing the first pluggable electric compact car. Whether this was going to be a good car wasn't part of the prediction.

But, it wasn't until I was asked pointblank that I started thinking hard. The question: Any predictions for the Philippines?

My answer after a few minutes: There will be more public demonstrations against the government especially its plans to ram through constitutional change in preparation for keeping GMA in power beyond 2010.

Philippine politics is not an immediately familiar subject here. But the martial law period is sufficiently known that it is can be recognized that a similar situation is approaching where a president for entirely selfish reasons will tinker with the constitution in order to legitimize moves to extend the hold on power.

This president is not even legitimately elected to begin with. This is the biggest scandal that the Filipinos will now finally realize as the most persuasive reason against charter change and to once again convene the parliament of the streets.

My most recent readings of my favorite columnists seem to bear this out. As 2010 draws closer the machinations of Malacanang are also revving up which are only getting all to obvious to the most ordinary, uninterested, unpoliticized Filipino.

From where I am this prediction seems too far out in time and space. But soon I shall be closer and shall have a better view of this prediction becoming history.