INVITATION

I haven't written much in a while. This is mostly because I have been occupied with preparing for a 'major' performance come end of July.

I have been invited to present a performance art piece at the 28e Symposium international d'art contemporain de Baie St-Paulin Baie Saint-Paul, Quebec. This event is reputedly among the most important art events of its kind in North America, and it is, indeed, a great honor to have been invited.

A component of my planned performance is something that doesn't happen within the performance. It is a website, in this case, a blogsite, that facilitates the functioning of the rest of the other components and which allows the work to further evolve beyond the actual performance itself.

I have been working on this blogsite. This is something I had long wanted to do (work on web design) ever since it was clear that graphic design was going to grow up with internet, whether or not the designers grew up with it. But I just didn't have a compelling enough project to work on. Now, this opportunity.

And, this invitation.

Please take a few minutes to drop in on, www.rowtodrownsos.blogspot.com

Then I need your feedback, especially on whether the links work (particularly the video and slideshow links). Try out the CONTACT ME and the MESSAGE REPLY/COMMENT FORM link. You can put 'test feedback' as subject on both (or on the MESSAGE REPLY/COMMENT FORM this can be the message number).

You can also say something about the design should you be inclined to comment on this part of the blogsite.

This being a blogsite i will post regularly here. At least I will try.
I will also take the liberty to send you these as soon as they are posted. Of course, you can always unsubscribe.

Lastly, please include in your feedback your machine (especially if its a mac), operating system and browser. These will help much in pinpointing problems and issues with the blogsite.

Enjoy and daghang matsalam!

05.20.10 kulturnatib

Enough?

Last weekend we visited a museum, our second in as many years. I didn't expect to see much difference between these visits. But it wasn't so much our expectations as much as that of our two-year old whose fascination with animals is in turn a continuous source of fascination for us that propelled this trip.

Animals are indeed the main feature of this museum. It is properly called so because it is not a zoo. Unlike their brethren in zoos who do nothing much except try to look like they are in the 'wild', – and occasionally overdo it by actually becoming 'wild' and harming keepers, handlers or the sometimes stupid or clueless visitor who gets too close -- the animals here actually do some work.

The work they do are often under appreciated, the credit going mostly to humans, who, of course, deserve some credit – the idea for this museum, for one – but not all, and not even the most important.

These are farm animals in an agricultural museum. It is a functioning museum in a way most museums are not. It is a demonstration farm involving mostly the fauna side of farming, although some exhibits are about the flora side (on our previous visit it was on hops and beer making) and its concomitant technologies (the present exhibit is on tractors).

Housed in the dairy barn of the still functioning Central Experimental Farm are animals we are familiar with. The mostly smaller local versions that is, of which, the fully-grown adult is just a juvenile in this farm.

Still, they are not out of the ordinary.

I was content enough to see them, their humongous selves, and be reminded, especially with the ruminants that cows are always female while the males are bulls and their offspring, when young enough are calves, when my wife called my attention.
There was something new in the museum after-all that we didn't see during our visit last year.

If not for the more detailed than most information card hanging on the enclosure fence they would not attract or encourage closer scrutiny. Actually, the information card, the only one there that was in the question and answer format of the popular “(Subject Here) For Dummies,” had an eyebrow raiser for its first question: What are transgenic spider silk goats?

Here was my first encounter with a GMO. At least one that was fully admitted as such unlike many staple food or food ingredients these days whose real provenance call only be guessed at by what it does not say in the label.

These goats have been genetically modified to produce milk with spider silk proteins. Researchers hope to produce spider silk in commercial quantities in goat's milk. Spider silk with its high tensile strength, elasticity and strength to weight ratio is ideal for use in biomedical devices, aerospace and transportation and the military.

The card goes on to explain how this silk is extracted, why the museum had these goats in the first place, if the goats are any different from ordinary, 'normal' goats, and other information of a mostly public relations kind that was clearly aimed at assuaging still widespread fears of 'frankenorganisms.'

Having the goats on display was by itself a public relations initiative as indeed admitted in the infocard for truly there was nothing particularly fearsome with the goats.

Yet, stepping out of the museum and into a truly wondrous spring day, I wondered with a book (“Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age,” by Bill McKibben) I read recently if with all the promise and, in fact, deliveries of technology, we can mature into a future where we will have learned to say 'enough.'

05.06.10 kulturnatib

OAV

Sometime before we left for our recent vacation a few weeks ago I learned from a Filipina friend that she had already voted, which was weeks before this conversation took place.

This surprised me. I had registered as an OAV (Overseas Absentee Voter) early enough last year that I should have been among the first in Canada or in the Ottawa-Gatineau region to receive my ballot in the mail.

We left for our vacation and tried to leave voting and politics behind. Not very successfully. But then I had already known what I wanted to do. In fact, I planned for a performance art piece on the elections, or on elections in general, as the piece finally developed into.

It become the installation-performance piece, “YouAreWhoYouVoteFor.”

And then, a few days later, upon Budoy Mirabiles's invitation to his exhibit opening, I did another piece, an extemporaneous one, “IVote.” This was in lieu of a repeat of the previous performance, which had become difficult on account of an unseasonal rain that drenched and damaged the voting box, but which would have been in keeping with Budoy's exhibit which was on recycling.

Given these, on our return, I lost little time in tracking down my ballot. It's right here, an embassy employee told me when I phoned. The Comelec mistyped your postal code, I was told further and was assured that I should get it in the mail soon.

I did, sooner than I expected. In an envelope - two envelopes actually, one, the original from the Comelec in Manila, and the other, the resend, from the Embassy in Ottawa – were documents and forms to facilitate and complete my vote.

It contained the certified list of 10 presidential, 8 vice-presidential, 61 senatorial and 187 party list candidates – five pages in all, the voting instructions, the official ballot and other peripherals whose non-use would nullify the vote.

It wasn't as daunting as I had expected. It helped that we didn't have to vote for 'local' officials, which, if I remember right what my brother said, would have easily tripled the number of pages for the certified candidate's list.

There were just a few hurdles. First, it wasn't stated in the instructions that one could either write the candidate's or party list's full name or a shorter, easier to remember one that appeared next to the full name. Liza Maza is the notable exception here because if her name was not that easy or short enough to remember then you could try Liza Maza ng Gabriela.

This might be easy enough to guess at, but it would be just as easy and more useful for a first time voter or a long-time boycotter like me to make this explicit in the instructions.

Then there is the business with the thumb mark. I fail to see how in this day and age the thumb mark continues to be a foolproof way to establish identity especially when, without proper supervision, it is difficult to get a print with sufficient 'legibility.'

That is if one had access to an ink pad to begin with. Again, in this day and age of the Ipad, who has use for an ink pad? In the house? Or, -- and this is the biggest advantage to absentee voting – wherever you're voting?

Fortunately, the Philippine Embassy in Ottawa, where, in a heartening display of proactiveness, there were ink pads at ready, is right downtown, just a few flights up from where I voted in a cafe where I was fully present knowing, actually way in advance, whose names were going to fill the blanks. Some, not all.

04.24.10 kulturnatib

Birds

After a while of being away, home is no longer a given. True, it is still there, but there has changed. For the best, the worse and, especially, forever.

Given that visiting home could not be worse than at election time, which often is timed for the hottest months of the year, that immediately gray-tinted my immediate appraisal of the city upon touchdown.

Yes, there are more high-rises, many racing towards completion. Yet, these not only tended to crowd out the sky but also seemed to choke the streets as well. More, as glass is the cladding material of choice for these buildings, in their neighborhood the heat gets magnified beyond unbearable.

Still, as we settled down, a more heartening picture presented itself. Not in the in-your-face manner of the city inexorably hurtling towards crowdedness even as, where we were, this was difficult to miss or ignore, but in the more subtle hint of a solitary note, then a call, then a mix of several distinguishable songs.

These were definitely more than last year, our first homecoming with our daughter in tow, when the only bird sound I seemed to hear was the crowing of roosters.

This observation I admit was influenced in no small part by our daughter who, hearing live roosters for the first time and just a few meters away at that, took to clambering up the window jalousy to see better the source of the sound that she recognized only as reproduced in books and other electronic media.

This time, rather surprisingly, the roosters didn't seem to be crowing. It is possible though that with more interesting tunes coming from other birds whose kind and numbers easily overpowered the roosters they were pushed towards the outer periphery of our attention.

Also, even last year, to our daughter's disappointment, she could have scaled the window all the way to the last jalousy pane and she would still not have spied any rooster. We just knew the roosters were nearby by the proximity of their sound.

We did spy some roosters through the cracks of the hollow block wall, but they, like all birds, hardly stayed put even if they were tethered in place. Consequently they would flit in and out of our vantage point. Observing them was an exercise in frustration.

Not, however, with these other birds. They were as free as the cliché allowed them and as that goes, moreover, allowing only for one kind of bird; the flying kind.

They were definitely the flying kind. But it wasn't this ability that snared my attention. It was their songs; As singular as fingerprints yet many times more captivating.

Still more captivating was the thought bolstered by what admittedly is anecdotal evidence that there were more of them number and species-wise.

Immediately I surmised that these birds must no longer be hunted or simply shot at the way they were when it seemed like the mayas were the only birds left owing, it must be, to their being uninteresting targets.

I thought to stop by at the shop of one of the city's more popular gunsmiths at that time when air rifles were a popular adult toy and birds were popular subjects to toy with to see how my theory held up.

Even as this shop was not far away from our ancestral house where my mother and a some siblings with their families still live my theory, for lack of time to test it, remained just that.

Yet, the fact also remains, providing an unexpected bonus to our homecoming, that the birds are there.

03.25.10 kulturnatib

friends
je m'exuse. computers have keys that when pressed do weird things. weird in a way that you dont expect. apparently while posting this, i pressed some key that distributed the wrong post and not even halfway through at that. sorry for wasting your time if you took the time to check that. this one should work better.
thanks for you patience.
roy


Play

Home and vacation are words that cluster together often with family and friends. Other words that gravitate towards each other and the just mentioned words are fun, rest, doing nothing.

Those words are foremost in my mind of late because, indeed, we are going on a vacation, heading home to family and friends. Yet, for me especially, it won't be much rest and, in fact, it will be doing quite a number of things. Even then it should be fun.

One of the best definitions of home, I find, is that by the American poet, Robert Frost. He said, in a poem, that home is where when you go there go they have to take you in. Something like that.

This is true, of course, for family and friends. In my case and especially with this immediately imminent vacation it is particularly true of friends who are also colleagues in art.

Birds of the same feather are said to flock together. All the more if these are artistic birds since nowhere in human experience are there more kinds of feathers than in art and they are distinguishable one from the other mostly – though paradoxically since artists are commonly thought of as singularly unique – through their flocks.

The flock of artist friends I share the same feathers with are of the species rara avis performartistscinensis. Otherwise known -- or as of yet mostly unknown -- as performance artists. There are not too many of them in Cebu despite the first sighting in 1978 and almost annually since then in an event called the MindWorks.

These somehow remained sporadic if somewhat scheduled bumps in Cebu's artistic landscape. Though still rooted in the UP Cebu Fine Arts Program, performance art broke through the confines of that program and since 2005-06 has steadily produced works in venues that artistic angels fear to tread.

Having had the honor of being part of that breakthrough, it is performance art and the performance artists of XO? I also consider home.

And so, it is with them that I will be doing a number of things. First, there is a video screening of some of my recent Canadian performances. Immediately after there will be live performances. There will be preparations for these, especially with the latter, involving a bit of construction. Both will happen on April 7 at the Outpost Restaurant, 9pm onwards.

Aside from that there is also this performance piece I have been invited to present in August. This work as it has developed so far has a Philippine (Cebu) component. I will be asking the help of school children (grade six) both from private and public schools.

I am hoping that these children – a hundred of them, if I can manage that number – will be up to the challenge.

I hope that I am up to the challenge with them and before hand, their teachers and even parents.

This is a work that will have what attracts me most to performance art; the capacity for being open-ended, the possibility for other openings or further development.

That might sound like work, but with art, especially performance art, that could as well be play. Serious play.

03.18.10 kulturnatib

City of design

Soon after arriving in Canada I joined two design competitions for public functional art. My previous experience with such competitions were not all that encouraging. Not so much because I failed to garner the top prize, but more so because the winning works do not stay for long in the public's eye. Worse, they stay even a shorter time in the public's mind.

It is tempting to say that the Filipino public has no mind for such things. But it is really those charged with developing the public's mind who have narrowed this mandate to just one thing; politics. And the worse possible kind at that.

Here in Canada, culture gets equal billing. There is a wide ranging consensus that arts and culture are the breath of life of a place, especially a city. Not only the so-called 'high' arts – opera, symphony orchestra, etc.- but also the popular, or more popularly accessible arts.

Thus, the competitions I joined were for bike racks and sewer or manhole covers. Both were municipal initiatives under laws that provided for a certain percentage of public infrastructure spending to be allotted for art.

I was successful with the bike racks. Twice over, as the two designs I submitted made the top thirty. As an added honor the rack with one of my designs was chosen as the representative rack for the unveiling ceremony.

An example of how the public mind is brought to bear upon these projects not only it its appreciation but even in the creation is how an exhibition was organized to showcase the designs. The public was then invited to view and rate them, both numerical and qualitative, which, together with that given by the jury, then became the final grade.

It was an agreeable and enlightening experience over-all. Encouraging, too.

This comes in handy as recently an architect-friend forwarded me a call for submissions to a design competition. Moving up from two to four wheels for me, this competition is to design taxi stands for Montreal.

I just have the barest of information in the forwarded message which is mostly from the official online source.

Yet, even before going to that source, a few things are immediately expected. Most importantly, this will be a team effort. In fact, my friend in saying that she was passing on a project that I could be interested in was also recommending a team I could be interested in working with for this project; her team.

This will be a complex project whose design parameters are multiperspective yet must be cohered into a singular design outcome. This spells a polysyllabic word: alotaheadache, but also translates into a monosyllabic one: fun.

Which is what Montreal is. Yet more than just fun it is a vibrant multicultural city that has been designated by UNESCO as a city of design. The taxi stands and the competition for its design reflect and is reflective of this designation.

03.11.10 kulturnatib

Irony

Last weekend I was extended an invitation similar to one that, a decade ago, I was giving out.

Honoring the invitation, I found myself in a kind of deja vu, and was soon mulling over the similarities and differences of this occasion and its attendant circumstances with the one a decade back, where, in the most immediate of these differences, I was among the hosts, while, this time around, I was among the guests.

Both occasions were the introduction of a studio-gallery and, simultaneously, a group exhibit to highlight this introduction.

The former space was called 'Lunâ,' and this more recent one, 'Le Temporaire.'

Neither are english names.

Le Temporaire, however, is easier to understand or guess at, while Lunâ was often mistaken for being english as the orthographic mark over the letter â was easily missed in the reading and forgotten or dispensed with in the writing especially when using an english designated computer keyboard.

Right away both names, resolutely non-english, are proud identity badges.

More so with Lunâ since adopting that name immediately carried a triple burden. First, pronounciation, leading to the explanation that, no, it is not luna or moon, then, identification, leading to a further explanation that, yes, it is an old Bisayan agricultural word that in its various applications could be translated into english as 'rooted in the rightful place'. Lastly, vision, leading to a discussion on how with the space the group hoped to encourage the development of the local contemporary visual arts.

In short, serious.

This was then reflected in the title of our group show, “Munas Ginhawa.” Or, struggling to breathe, a local expression that means in the achieving of something one almost lost one's breath.

Meanwhile, Le Temporaire, as the name suggests, is a bit lighter or less fixed. And, in what seems to be in keeping with that name is the title of their show, “Pique-nique,” whose english equivalent is, likewise, not difficult to arrive at.

Lighter, however, does not at all mean less serious, especially in the sense of commitment to art.

While there is almost a generational gap between the artists of Lunâ and Temporaire there is no question or difference in their commitment to art.

The biggest difference, however, is not with these two groups and their spaces, but in their particular general cultural milieu.

The Temporaire artists decided to call their space that because of their short-term lease. The building owner wants to tear it down and replace it with another structure. But the present structure is in a 'heritage' rich area regulated by 'heritage preservation' laws.

There are also such laws in the Philippines. But they are hardly respected and, much less, enforced.

Here they are and that is what the Temporaire group is banking on. They plan to take on the building owner as they assert the prerogatives of heritage and culture.

The Lunâ Art Collective, meanwhile, struggled under a milieu that is still largely indifferent to art, personified in the current mayor who cares nothing for art because, you cannot eat art, he has said.

Lunâ survived a while. But, Le Temporaire could very possibly exist longer. I smiled at that irony as I walked to the bus stop.

01.14.10 kulturnatib

Winston

Winston is not a usual name for a mother. But then, a mother is not what Winston would usually think of himself either, though, he would surely laugh at this, in the boisterous way he has been known for and with it a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

But, yes, he is a mother especially with the important virtue of being nurturing. This is, of course, a throwback to the strict unapologetic sexist days of the sharp divide between father and motherhood. Even the stereotype now accepts that fathers can be just as nurturing.

Still, recognizing this, Winston would appreciate the tongue-in-cheek nature of this declaration. So he – and I, for myself -- wouldn't mind being grouped with the mothers.

Also, there is a bit of irony in this. Winston, who turned half a century old very recently, could or, more likely, would not even be a father, so far as I know. He remained a staunch bachelor in the strict legal sense of the word.

Yet, there are more than a handful of people who could attest to Winston's generous nurturing.

Foremost would be the artists and musicians. Winston was one himself. Not one for hogging the limelight, he honed his art of drumming and percussion playing to virtuosity in the kind of obscurity that back-bench or back-up musicians are familiar with.

Still, drums and percussion are not exactly quiet instruments. And early on in his musical career he earned the notoriety for being a power drummer of a kind that had a few broken drums to his name and, at one point, membership in a blacklist of one from one of the more popular live music joints in the city in the early 80s.

When I caught up with him, his musical career was in full bloom and he had learned that power drumming had little to do with sheer decibel count. In fact, in one particular instance at that time when we bumped into each other, he was shadow-drumming with a walkman, playing to one of the greatest exponents of the judicious use of silence in music: Miles Davis.

Of the musicians that he subsequently influenced the most notable would be Budoy Marabiles and Jr Kilat. In an example of the expansive and inclusiveness of music, Winston and Budoy are connected, though generations apart, by their common search for a relevant musical vernacular.

More directly, Jr Kilat came about as a band name only because Leon Kilat was already taken. Budoy realized this and realized further that the music that he was creating was not just new but also old, rooted in the revolutionary spirit of Leon Kilat the now mostly forgotten hero and Leon Kilat the early 80s band that Winston was among the founding members of.

Then, in the last two years there were the musicians who Winston brought with him on a journey across what locally is still uncharted territory; the bridge between the musico-aural, visual and performative arts.

Here we found ourselves collaborating directly. The resulting performance works surprised us both. Even with minimal prior discussion we both developed our individual contributions or elements to a single work that was much more layered with multiple platforms for the elaboration of meaning or relevance. We were establishing the co-primacy of music or sound in the overall performative work.

Most recently, Winston was involved in nurturing the reestablishment of old ties from the time when we can be said to be most conscious of our developing individual and social selves – and from this, the selectivity of memory; our elementary school days.

This group, some physically and many, like myself, in cyberspace, kept track as Winston fell sick. As he was admitted into the hospital. As he recovered and returned home. Then, as he fell once more. This time, fatally.

But, fatal is not final. Winston continues as we do. If we do.

01.07.10 kulturnatib

IYBB

This year has been declared by the United Nations to be the International Year of Biodiversity or IYB.

Even before this declaration or before I learned about it, I had already made my own somewhat related declaration or resolution that at that time didn't have any special designation to it.

Now, taking the cue from the UN, my resolution is called IYB with an added B; IYBB for International Year of the Backyard Bird.

While I have had my share of more than just passing interest in birds – among others, when I was producing a magazine-format TV program I made it a point to include an episode on the birds in the Tabunan Forest, the last remaining patch of forest in Cebu and another one on the Olanggo Bird Sanctuary – it was two recent bird incidents that led to this resolution.

The first, though chronologically this came later, is not an actual bird incident. It is a virtual one, though not of the cyber kind.

At the entrance of the main branch of the Ottawa Public Library is a much smaller library I try to avoid, like a recovering alcoholic avoiding a bar. The books here are for sale for usually cheaper than your usual bottle, pint, glass or shot in a bar.

Here I found, “Songbird Journeys : Four Seasons in the Lives of Migratory Birds.” As my usual practice is with books whose covers I find arresting – this one is with a strong Audobonesque flavor – I started flipping the pages randomly to see if the content is as captivating.

I flipped to page 28: “They streamed just feet away but made no attempts to approach or land . . . I could have caught dozens, perhaps, hundreds with a butterfly net . . . the effect was exactly like standing on a rock in the middle of a swiftly flowing river . . . the river of birds continued to flow hour after hour . . . .”

This was a description of birder John Arvin on an off-shore oil drilling platform off the Louisiana coast. He was part of the project to monitor bird migration across the Gulf of Mexico where he was lucky enough to witness a rare ornithological spectacle and to be among the few eye witnesses of the magnitude of this migration that had been previously contested but then undeniably confirmed with the use of radar.

From this book I've learned many things. Among them, that Henry David Thoreau wasn't just an iconoclastic radical but was also a passionate birder and that Walden Pond wasn't just an experiment with economic and political self-sufficiency but an ornithological observatory as well.

More importantly, it confirmed – which ties in to the other and earlier bird incident – that birds migrate at night.

Walking home one early evening, sometime in mid-November, I heard the familiar squaking of geese. I looked up. But, with the sun just a thin orange line over the horizon, I could't see anything. Still the squaking continued and becoming louder.

Then, there they were. A graciously undulating and flapping ribbon. Just a tiny strand of that carpet of the great winter bird migration. I watched until they were swallowed by the cooling, soon to be icy sky.

Still there are the resident birds. The backyard birds. They will test my resolve; To watch, appreciate, learn.