The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 54 (above and opposite) Hairloom 2021 Mixed-media installation / Loom: human hair, cotton thread, gauze, wood, bamboo, acrylic glass, colonial piedras (sandstone blocks) / 1250 x 101cm / Garments: gauze, woven cotton, stainless steel, fishhooks, human hair, carved wood hands / Commissioned for APT10 / Courtesy: The artist / Photographs: Chloë Callistemon Rocky Cajigan draws on the rich cultures of the Philippines’ Cordillera region to explore aspects of indigeneity, ethnography and decolonisation. His installations and assemblages are characterised by a profusion of objects which call attention to the hybrid contexts from which they arose, hinting at prior narratives and histories. Their juxtaposition allows Cajigan to build up layered and textured meanings. This fascination with objects also has its roots in the artist’s childhood: Cajigan’s mother ran a souvenir shop filled with local and historical items, and his primary school was situated beside the Bontoc Museum, where he was a regular visitor. Since 2017, Cajigan has created a group of works based on the backstrap weaving loom, a device used in communities across South-East Asia, including the Cordillera region. He recalls his great aunts and uncles weaving customary Bontoc garments on these looms, in which the weaver fastens the warp of threads around their own waist. Such textiles continue to have deep ceremonial and social significance, and each garment displays unique motifs and associated symbolism that have developed over centuries, long preceding colonisation. Cajigan’s site-specific and ephemeral loom works have been installed in locations in Taiwan, Nepal and the Philippines, some using the traditional frame of the loom and others supported by the architecture of the site itself. In each case, the form of the work responded to local histories. For example, in Fabric of Activisms 2 2017, Cajigan used anti-corruption and human rights protest posters as the loom’s fabric, pointing to the association of the University of the Philippines Diliman (where the work was exhibited) with a history of activism. Looped through the remnants of burnt backstrap looms — salvaged from a Bontoc dwelling with burnt household objects — the threads hint at both the destruction and resilience of indigenous culture. For A Barrier, a Time 2019, in Kaalo Art Space in Nepal, Cajigan worked with a Nepalese sukul weaver to create a floor-based lingam surrounded with brightly coloured cotton threads. The work was site-specific, responding to the space of the building, as well as process-based, evolving over time. Each day over a period of three weeks, Cajigan added a new thread, traversing the room to create a kind of rainbow maze. Both the woven lingam and the knots used in the maze were informed by discussions with local indigenous artists, and A Barrier, a Time allowed Cajigan to study every corner of the space as a way of coming to terms with ideas of ‘knowing’ and connection. The installation was intended as a visual metaphor for the nature of ephemeral collaborations, as opposed to the transactional connections more common in capitalist societies and in the contemporary art world. Hairloom 2021, shown in APT10, takes the form of a backstrap loom constructed from human hair and wooden loom tools, overlaid on open-weave gauze. Cajigan collected the hair from salons in the towns of La Trinidad and Bontoc. Through a time-consuming and painstaking process, he and his assistants treated and glued the hair together in larger strands, weaving through coloured threads, until it formed a kind of warp and weft for a reimagined loom more than 12 metres long. Suspended from the wall at a height, it is weighted with blocks made from sandstone piedras once used by the Spanish colonisers to build roads and churches. In addition, garments woven from muslin gauze, the kind used to bandage a wound, are suspended on metal poles, capped with carved wooden hands and hung from butcher hooks. A woven shirt, which closely resembles a Cordilleran style of textile, was in fact made in Guatemala, and is fringed with white human hair to form a new object of material culture. As an organic, bodily component, the gathered hair of the work provides a dynamic element that counters the static nature of the museum or gallery space. It also implies a form of collectivity and communal life, characteristic of Igorot culture. Through Hairloom , Cajigan literally weaves together the DNA strands of his ancestry. A painting of a rice-storage structure, enclosed in a box frame with steel hardware and etched glass, is titled Case of Emergency (Dalican, Bontoc, Mountain Province 2616 Philippines) 2021. With food in short supply during the COVID-19 pandemic, further human rights abuses against indigenous communities escalated, while bribery and corruption were rife. This synthesis of hybrid objects is characteristic of Cajigan’s practice and creates a strong narrative on indigeneity and cultural fusion, on the wounds within and homogenisation of cultures, but also their ongoing vitality and resilience. Abigail Bernal Rocky Cajigan Fontok and Kankanaey people Born 1988, Bontoc, the Philippines Lives and works in La Trinidad and Bontoc