WHERE is the Mindanao Settler?
Be it painting, sculpture, literature or film, when I am presented with any work of creativity by a Settler artist, this is one of the first questions I ask.
Mindanao, with its diverse peoples, is also home to a multiplicity of perspectives, and it is easy to lose oneself in that often tumultuous melee of identities. It is the responsibility of artists to strengthen the integrity of their cultures, helping us know who we are (and, often, force us to realize who we are pretending to be).
Our artists, after all, bear the gasera of our peoples' self awareness, guiding us forward into self determination. And we cannot afford to have blind torchbearers.
It is foretelling, then, that one of the first sculptures to greet one upon entering The BauHaus Gallery's Kulit Kultura is an eyeless dark figure splattered with pink, hands wrapped around herself helplessly as if lost.
Kulit Kultura, one of the first art events in Davao since the pandemic brought much of life to a halt, is a sculpture-focused exhibit by The BauHaus Gallery in Davao City, a trendy restaurant-cum-art space. As the exhibit's rather insolently written narrative proclaims, Kulit Kultura "offers sculptors a platform to prod and stimulate Mindanawon imaginations into dynamism, and an opportunity for Mindanawon audiences to experience the empowering art of sculpture."
Entering Kulit Kultura then, a Mindanawon would do well to take up this challenge, using works in this exhibit as opportunities to reflect on the Mindanawon condition.
The Mindanao Settler condition most of all, as most of the exhibited artists are Settlers, and this exhibit is in Davao, one of the most bajo de la campana cities in Mindanao.
Where, then, is the Mindanao Settler in the exhibit's pieces?
In one of the cosiest corners of the gallery is Jag Bueno's painting in acrylic of a warrior clad in stereotypically "native" attire, bearing what looks like a Monuvu Kompilan , and mid air as he is about to strike a man in the garb of a colonial soldier. When asked who they think is depicted, some young visitors to the gallery immediately say Lapu Lapu attacking Magellan.
Bueno being an artist considerably aware of local history, the painting most likely depicts Davao's Datu Bago, perhaps about to attack one of the conquistador Oyangguren's men.
Why do young people in Davao think of Magellan and Lapu Lapu first before they think of Datu Bago and Oyangguren?
Here, then, is our first glimpse of the Settler -- lost. Blissfully and fascinatingly lost.
Kulit Kultura is, amid the technical (and often impressive) skill of the artists in full display, a gloriously telling exhibition of the Settler's condition of being Saag, lost, culturally blind to their own Settlerhod and local realities.
But this seemingly painful truth is part of what makes this exhibit so charming -- art gives us mirrors for us to see ourselves, even the parts hard to accept. We are prodded (to use the exhibit narrative's language) to confront the pagkasaag of the Settler, and from the Saag, self awareness hatches and takes flight.
Elsewhere in the exhibit we get clues as to why Settlers are so lost. Not all artists in the exhibit are from Mindanao, but their participation is welcomed as they offer helpful lessons for Mindanawons.
Arnel Borja's sculpture in the exhibit, a carefully balanced figure of a shark, evokes hints of steampunk with its use of mechanical parts. But its fins are decorated with motifs from the Tagabawa Inabal textile, an accent which seems wholly without purpose (perhaps merely to give it the tokenist trappings of "native").
In another artwork, perhaps one of the most pretty in the exhibit, Danny Rayos del Sol's wooden lamp decorated with carved eggs catches the eye and would look exquisite in some expensive hotel. But this Taguig-born artist's gorgeous work, exhibited in Davao, features images of bodhisattvas in Khmer, Burmese, and Chinese-like renditions, all framed in the Okir of the Meranaw (who are mostly Muslim).
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why we are so lost - we have no sense of locale. In our eagerness to "win as one" (to use the recent SEA Games' tepid slogan), we lose sight that we are many, and worse, we lose sight of who we are.
We end up scavenging identities, forcing them together haphazardly, never mind if they don't hold, claiming what is not ours while neglecting what is our own, all while secretly hoping that "the universal" would somehow come out from our cobbled excuse of an identity.
Mindanao Settler Jong Tangiday's Once Upon a Precolonial Time shows this so comically best. The artist -- one of Davao's most respected sculptors -- clearly has the concept of the afterlife in mind, and he also has the idea of making that physical by developing the image of the Manunggul Jar. It is a bold undertaking (typical of seasoned artists, who know that art is in the attempt): there is the risk of just making a crude imitation of a rather famous artifact. No artist wants their work to be dismissed as a crude imitation.
Tangiday avoids that risk, but gets the pleasure of failing in this piece in the opposite direction -- by overdoing the concept.
He expands the boat that decorates the original Manunggul Jars, adding to its figures different images of the afterlife from different cultures. Then on the side he writes all the consonants of the extinct Baybayin script of the Tagalogs.
It is a Frankenstein of a piece, and it does not live. The Manunggul jar (from Palawan hundreds of kilometres from Davao) has nothing to do with the Maitum Jars (closer in Mindanao but still out of place in Davao), and both have nothing to do with Mebuyan (the Tagabawa goddess of the afterlife immediately recognizable for being covered in breasts to breastfeed the souls of dead babies) sitting at the boat's head. The only thing that binds them (and the appropriately dead Baybayin writing system) is the idea of the afterlife, but to that the Meranaw Torogan added at the boat's bottom is again out of place.
The images cobbled together in this and other pieces in the exhibit are as rooted as driftwood, and as incoherent as the archipelagic nation-state called the Philippines which they are clearly trying to give imagery to.
Settlerhood is the product of Philippine coloniality, a result of its tendency to distort and homogenize. It is unsurprising that Tangiday's work is as saag as del Sol's bodhisattva okir and Arnel Borja's steampunk shark with Inabal fins.
But that incoherence is part of Tangiday's Settlerhood, and this piece does well in displaying that pagkasaag. Tangiday shines as an artist by capturing (albeit inadvertently) how the Philippine nation has made us lose sight of who we really are, his art giving us opportunity to confront and master the pagkasaag, stop being Frankenstein Filipinos and start being living Mindanawon.
This is not the only instance where Tangiday in his art captures Settlerhood inadvertently. Elsewhere, he has another sculpture, one entitled Mebuyan, an abstract depiction of the goddess in driftwood. The sculptor's fascination for the Tagabawa goddess is typical of the Settler fascination for all things Lumad and Moro, a fascination the other Settler artists in Kulit Kultura demonstrate. Jag Bueno has paintings of a Lumad hunter and a Lumad woman bearing cassava. Anoy Catague's Pugngan Pay Baha, a gorgeous, coral-eel-like sculpture covered in vivid Murakamiseque detail, is subtly reminiscent of the Meranaw (and Indochinese) Naga. And the central figure in Bong Espinosa's Fisherfolk's Journey is framed by the unmistakeable sail of the Tausug vinta.
Here, again, is the Mindanao Settler - ever fascinated with the Lumad and Moro.
This, however, has perils. The Settler Gaze, which establishes the Settler as observer and the Lumad and Moro as object of observation, is often patronizing and tokenist, but at its worst it can be dehumanizing.
Kulit Kultura also delightfully offers a demonstration of that.
(To be continued.)