Boses ng Masa is deceptively simple and painfully familiar, which is what’s both good and bad about it: the discussion is worth having, but you can see that ending from a mile away.
It’s not that you’ve seen this before, as it is that you have lived it.
The Canada Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) News website came out with an interesting piece about the state of discourse in the Philippines given mainstream media on the one hand, and the rise of fake news as propaganda on the other. Written by Senior Correspondent Adrienne Arsenault, it had as headline a quote from Rappler’s Maria Ressa, saying that “Democracy as we know it is dead,” which first made me imagine that the article was going to talk about the urgent concerns of summary executions on the streets and drug-related deaths, or the continued control by big business, oligarchs, and feudal lords over government despite a President who seems to stand squarely for the people (if / when his pronouncements hold and given his pro-people appointees), or even just the continued verbal assault against free speech from the President and his men.
Instead Ressa – and this article – were referring to the death of democracy … in relation to fake news and people like Mocha.
Yes, I’m as stunned as you are. (more…)
The idea of an art biennial in Manila is reason enough to get excited about the London Biennale’s Manila Pollination. The dominant mainstream market-oriented gallery system and the annual celebratory art fairs in Manila have generally meant a lack in critical rigour and artistic vision – two elements that art goers hope a biennale can make up for.
Founder (in 1998) and co-curator of the London Biennale Filipino artist David Medalla says in the curatorial note that this biennale is about ‘challenging and transforming the notion of the art world “biennale” as a large state or corporate-sponsored event… by throwing open borders and encouraging a more intimate and community-based dialogue between the artists and audiences’. Originally only based in London, this alternative biennale has evolved to include various communities in other countries through what are called “pollinations” in places like Rio de Jainero, Berlin, Belgium, and Rome. This is the first Manila Pollination of this scale, as opposed to an obscure exhibit or two in the past. (more…)
The mapping of art and nations through a biennale is a foregone conclusion when it is both premise and project, specifically in the case of the Singapore Biennale, the past two editions of which (2011 and 2013) were heavily contextualized in or concerned with the championing of Southeast Asian (SEA) art and artists – no matter the requisite works chosen from across Asia and beyond. The task, conscious or unconscious, is that of representation.
One imagines this could be a burden for any curatorial team. After all, (re)presenting SEA at this point is more complex than just mouthing post-colonial clichés. It demands of us a nuanced, critical stance that engages with the more difficult questions about ourselves, beyond what we have been made to believe as (post-)colonial subjects. It is a complicated conversation that needs to be had if we are to move forward as a region, which might also be why it’s easier to avoid it altogether.
Sadly, this is what the Singapore Biennale’s 2016 edition did: fall back on the platitudes and banalities that present SEA as a region that is built upon discourses on identity and independence, history and geography. It went for the easy, evading the challenge of representing SEA in all its complexity and contradiction. (more…)
Once again, Malacañang’s spokespersons had it wrong, commenting on the Madam Secretary episode before they even saw it, putting it into question for whatever it was that they were told it contained: a fictional Philippine President who’s punched in the face by the fictional US Secretary of State, for having made a sexual advance at her.
That image, of a Philippine President, nose bleeding from the punch made the rounds, and of course the President’s propagandists and his spokespersons went on overdrive defending him. But that’s the thing with fiction: you can’t even prove it was President Duterte they were talking about.
In fact, to an extent, it wasn’t at all about him or this fictional President. It’s about how America deals and engages with the Philippines. And that’s always an important conversation to have. (more…)