1993 APT1 Conference : Identity, tradition and change

As I am writing this essay, I look forward to another exhibition and collaborative visual theater project initiated by KASIBULAN. This time, we have invited some sympathetic male artists to our project "The Filipina Migrant Worker" to be held in Manila and other overseas venues where it is pertinent and culturally tolerated. We attempt to demonstrate how artists, through an exchange with migrant worker, their families and comfort women, can through their creative output can advocate bilateral agreements to protect the rights and dignity of our women migrant workers. VISION OF WOMEN AS SOCIETY'S REDEEMERS Elimination of war and violence, and an expanded sense of familial peace founded on a motherly concern for her children are feminist visions for a gender-fair, humane society. This thesis has been articulated, directly or indirectly, consciously or subconciously by some women's works. Sandra Torrijos in 1990 created a mural called Mothers Arising, which is a vision of women coming together in a cycle of pain, sacrifice, death, mourning, liberation, growth , and celebration. Faceless androgynes inhabit her canvas - some buxomly, others emaciated, but all wrapped in shroud. They linger through an arcane world of shadow-haunted caves and desolate arcades. As they float, some would ascend to a luminescent skyworld, others would descend to a fiery abyss. Blown by tempestuous forces, some are in the process of unwrapping, struggling against their bondage, as metaphor to woman's personal search for self-knowledge and self-liberation. Perhaps as an effect of her artistic-political work with Kalayaan (Women for Freedom) , she comfortably intertwines spirituality with social militance. The mural's centerpiece is a symbolic portrait of a feminist heroine of the political underground martyred during the Marcos regime, metaphysically woven with labyrinthine flows of sun, moon, and astral forms. Amusing, if not censorable, sexual politics interweave into Agnes Arellano's transcendental musings on the paradox of life. She parallelizes the gender yin-yang with the dichotomy of destruction and creation. In her cold cast marble series of 1982-90 recently installed as Temple of the Sun God, she equated maleness with destruction, violence and death. The Army, a troop of kitschy helmeted phalluses, Obelisk, a provocative, circumcized pillar textured with shrunken skulls, and Bronze Bullets , a threatening batallion of metallic missiles marching toward an angel-of -death door are all blatant tributes to male destructiveness, in both philosophical and realpolitik spheres. She contrasts this with Temple of the Moon Goddess , a series of sculpture done 1983-88, which pays homage to the female principle as life-giver that picks up from ashes of chaos and annihilation. Eternal Oval is an absolute ovum suggestive of woman's fertile matrix. Hermaphroditic Homonculus is a gizzardly arch that intimately hovers a viewer within a larger-than life pelvic cavity. Carcass Cornucopia'is a 5