Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

SPEAKER: Santiago Bose The h ighlanders of Northern Luzon , inhabitants of the Cord illeras collectively known as lgorots, always had a strong sense of their own identity. Having resisted the colon ial incursion of the Spanish conquistadors and friars they had less cause to question their identity compared with their lowland brothers. Art activity in Bagu io started in the 70s when many artists moved up to the cooler climate and to be far from the repressive martial law regime of Marcos. Art organisations were cliques of kindred souls and art activities were open ings in hotel lobbies. There was no grass-roots support and artists were unpopular. Many artists left the country for better economic and intellectual pursuits overseas. The city's present role as a catalyst for Cordilleras artists and as a centre, through Baguio Arts Guild's bi-annual of art activity, began shortly after Marcos fled Manila, involuntarily ending twenty years of tyrann ical rule. Many of the artists soon to found Baguio Arts Guild (BAG) had returned to Baguio or had chosen Baguio as a place to work. My return to my city was due to several factors, not the least being because I real ised that working from the centres of art to a large extent marginal ises the cultural production of a country like the Philippines. Other artists who joined me in Baguio were German-based filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik, London-based Ben Cabrera and Roberto Villanueva from h is forays in South East Asia. The commun ity was fortuitous and after several meetings we were joined by several Baguio-based artists - Willy Magtibay, Rene Aquitan ia, Wig Tysmans and others . Despite logistical limitations and barely adequate funding the Guild has had five national and international festivals. The Guild's success is attributed to its stress on homegrown aesthetics which has been essential to creating an alternative movement, away from an overdependence on the West and Man ila. The Guild has emerged as a veh icle for empowerment, a way of controlling and creating our images rather than letting those outside take primacy. Here in a microcosm is the dialectic between Third World assertions and First World control of information. Here too lies the dialectic between Baguio and Manila, the centres and the peripheries. In terms of the cultural production of exh ibitions in galleries and museums, Manila has been largely the feeding ground of artists who, as Marian Pastor Roces put it in an essay entitled 'Ethos Bathos Pathos', 'are fully committed to Euro-American art history, and who produce works precisely cal ibrated vis-a-vis that history'. True enough : of the large contingent of artists who have ventured abroad over the decades , only a handful have �ade a mark. However imperfect, efforts of the Bagu io-based artists and the Guild must be related to the context of the ongoing struggle to reclaim both psychic and cultural territories from the invader, nowadays more likely to wear the mask of pop culture and the 'international' styles . In a larger context, Bagu io's ecl ipse of Manila parallels the demand for more autonomy from Malacanang (our version of the White House) to local governments , the growing insistence among cultural workers and creators on re-evaluating whom and what exactly they look to for ideas and inspiration, echoing the reth ink of pol itical alliances to suit reg ional aspirations. The domestic shift in political and cultural emphasis is manifested globally by the resurgence of ethnic-based nationalism and the revival everywhere of homegrown art, art that is more reflective of the artist's history. Its extremes lead to repugnant phenomena such as ethn ic cleansing that must be condemned as a fratricidal attempt to turn the clock back and reinvent both peoples and cultures . It is not a question of wearing the G-string again. It's more of a conceptual thing. More of a reckoning than a reconfiguration , even reassessment of the new Filipino influenced by geography and a history that is like no other, with the ambivalent baggage of a colon ial past side by side with modernist sensibilities and the tribal . 1 3 1