Shared Perspectives (Lisa Ito on Tutok Karapatan Exhibition)

Shared Perspectives
Lisa Ito

Tutok Karapatan’s first university-based exhibition,
Perspektiba, is comprised of works that reflect on the
overtures of state violence: literal and metaphorical
dislocations, disappearances, and demises associated
with the rising wave of political repression in the
Philippines.

Perspektiba was initially conceptualized as a show
which would chronicle the making of martyrs and heroes
vis a vis struggles against reigns of terror. However,
in the course of the artists’ exposure and
interactions with victims or survivors of human rights
violations, the show evolved into a general
remonstration against the cases of political
repression besieging the nation.

In particular, Perspektiba addresses the continuous
political assassinations of members of the legal
opposition and progressive peoples organizations under
the Arroyo administration. From 2001 to date, over 775
activists and civilians all over the country have been
murdered inside their homes or in transit to work,
usually by masked, motorcycle-riding gunmen. Others
have been killed and considered as 'collateral damage'
in the course of the government's military campaigns
in the provinces: strafed or intentionally shot at by
soldiers, tortured or summarily executed.

While local and international organizations,
non-government entities, parliamentarians and
personalities are sounding the alarm over President
Gloria Arroyo's refusal to stop the six-year killing
spree, artists have added their voices to the growing
clamor for truth and justice by producing works
addressing the murders.

Lyra Garcellano sets up an installation entitled No
Letup from ink on paper riddled with plaster casts of
bullets, alluding to the shower of steel mercilessly
unleashed by the state machinery against hundreds of
fallen human targets. White Lies, an installation by
the multi-media artist collective UGAT-Lahi, delivers
a symbolic indictment against the whitewash
perpetuated by the state machinery in response to the
killings. Pale dummies are piled on a bed, one covered
up by the others, enveloping the gravity of the
murders in a blanket of lies.

Anak ng Tinapay, an installation piece by Mark Ramsel
Salvatus III, utilizes food art and video
documentation to gather public reactions to the
killings. Salvatus enjoins the audience to partake of
bread shaped into human figures and guns, displayed on
a glass cupboard. The artist documents the entire
selection and feeding process among gallery visitors
in this premeditated 'taste test', delivering a
tongue-in-cheek message against the carnage and degree
of militarization that the public is forced to consume
daily. Neither Left Nor Right by Claro Ramirez makes
use of counters to parody the propensity to treat the
killings as mere statistics, as figures that
mechanically rise or ebb with the political tide.

Satiric commentary against the military’s involvement
as a perpetrator or accomplice to the killings is
reinforced in the work Sir Yes Sir (a common phrase
used in military-style drills to signify subservience
to one’s superiors) by Jef Carnay. This interactive
installation is comprised of a mechanized, hand-made
dog (or tuta, a popular symbol for lackeys) which bows
at the viewer’s patting and dips its head into a feed
bowl filled with miniature human figurines.

While these works were produced by young artists who
were perhaps only toddlers at the onset of the
dictatorship in 1972, an oil-on-canvas work entitled
Daet Massacre by Social Realist painter Gene de Loyola
attests to the chilling similarities between incidents
during Martial Law and today. De Loyola depicts a
scene from a massacre of unarmed protesters in Daet,
Camarines Norte in 1981, shortly after the 'paper
lifting' of Martial Law of that same year. Shot at by
police forces at the height of the dispersal, the
protesters, with the dead and injured in their ranks,
are depicted against a blood-red backdrop, with one
bearing a placard calling for the boycott of an
impending election believed to be fraudulent. Nearly
twenty-five years later, this scene would be reenacted
in the bloody dispersals of activists calling for
President Arroyo's ouster in Bicol and in the massacre
of striking sugar mill and farm workers in Hacienda
Luisita on November 16, 2004.

The current assaults on press freedom are also
addressed in the work by multi-media artist Ed Manalo.
A typewriter – a common symbol for writers and
journalists- - is tightly-wrapped in a straitjacket of
cellophane sheets, alluding to the muzzling of the
press under the current dispensation. Acupuncture
needles piercing through the cellophane may represent
both anguish and healing in response to the iniquities
that the muzzling of expressive freedom has brought
about.

The ferocity and frequency of such atrocities has
reached the point where it is not longer possible to
ignore the gravity of the entire situation. Buen
Calubayan demonstrates this through a sound
installation on an armchair. Hindi naman talaga
kailangan ang mata upang makita ang realidad, the
artist asserts. One only needs to listen to the cues
pointing to an entire epic of injustice.

On the other hand, many nevertheless remain blind and
deaf to social iniquities. The Parable of Those Who
Refuse to See, an installation piece made out of wood
cut-outs and video animation by Don Salubayba, sets up
a parade of shadowy figures on the venue’s glass
façade as metaphors for repressive societal structures
whose influence pervades up to the present: the fraile
of the Church, the ubiquitous figure of Uncle Sam, a
bloated government functionary, and three blind mice
led by the recognizable Mickey Mouse. The ultimate
victim here remains the figure of Juan dela Cruz bent
and hobbling in the foreground.

The works in Perspektiba also depicts the victims of
such rights violations. Pyeta by Emmanuel Garibay
utilizes the undertones of Catholic iconography in the
Madonna and Child image in his work, where a woman,
mouthless and clad in a black mourning shroud, holds
up a portrait of a man (her son? Husband? Father?)
crowned with thorns. When viewed in the context of the
Philippine human rights situation, the absence of a
mouth, symbolic of the right to expression, raises
questions: is the woman a metaphor for Inang Bayan
(Mother Land), denied of the right to speak or to be
heard, with the death of her sons? Or are words
insufficient to express the pathos and anguish of
losing a loved one? Garibay’s depiction of the victim
of persecution as Christ crowned with thorns likewise
elevates him/her to the status of a martyr, a hero/ine
worthy of honor and emulation.

Perspektiba testifies to how the propensity for
fascism is systematically embedded not only in policy
but also in consciousness. These histories and
narratives of rights violations are contextualized in
light of ongoing peoples’ struggles for national
liberation and self-determination, as seen in the
installation work Rebo (Series 2) by Social Realist
veteran Antipas “Biboy” Delotavo, Jr. In the work,
Delotavo wraps the letters ‘R-E-B-O-L’ in bloodied
gauze bandages, military camouflage, and flags of the
United States and the Philippines. The letters, still
to be completed, may comprise the word rebo, slang for
the word rebolusyon or revolution, or conversely, the
word eboluyson, the entire historical process of
development implied by the clash of societies and
classes. This historical—and repeated—emergence of
fascist repression, born out of the material
exigencies of imperial expansion and its ideological
justifications, is addressed in Jose Tence Ruiz’s Supa
series, where figures of Mussolini and a Nazi dominate
the picture plane solidly filled with red.

Nevertheless, many continue to believe that another
world without exploitation and repression is possible,
and work to achieve it. The aspirations behind this
driving force is reflected in works such as Boy
Dominguez’ Salladan (Ancestral Domain). The artist,
himself a member of a national minority, represents
the aspirations of Filipino indigenous peoples to a
society where development is based on the peoples’
needs and welfare. The work also underscores the
interdependence of human, cultural, environmental
rights in building a more secure world for the
majority of the population.