Shared Resources and Media Art Production in Manila
L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
—
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
In a country where institutional support is rudimentary and
scarce and where media art is still unfamiliar and very new, the production of
media art faces more difficulties than marketable artifacts such as paintings
and objects.
For the purposes of this essay we will define ‘media art’ as
works involving film, sound, video, and machines and/or made with cameras;
sound and video recorders; and computers. There is no deliberate ideological
rationale behind this definition, only the brute fact that my own artistic interests
and practices revolve around these things, which have in turn determined the
circles I move in and the artists I meet, know and talk to. However, it should
be noted that the same difficulties surround many minority art genres,
particularly any with a large performance element.
In the Philippines, media art is still a relatively minor
and unfamiliar tradition, whose products currently face microscopic or
nonexistent markets and an absence of friendly exhibition spaces. However, its
practice often requires specialized and sometimes expensive equipment and
specialized knowledge. Such impediments appear to have engendered three major
consequences:
1) a media art scene that is primarily centered around
performances and screenings in ad hoc or popup events
2) the sharing of knowledge and resources by its
practitioners
3) the creation of informal, ad hoc arrangements that
facilitate production
Interviews and discussions with fellow media artists
clarified three characteristics of the solutions/adaptations that have emerged
in response to the factors of outlined above. The first is:
·
Almost all
“shared resources”, whether in the form of space, material, service, or
equipment, are owned by a single person who shares the resource out to a
selected number of people.
As a result, all those who make use of the resource always
have the status of either friend, guest, or some nested variation such as friend of a guest of a friend and so
on. There currently are no arrangements of the type that underly the so-called ‘hacker
spaces’ popular in more prosperous countries, which are owned and maintained
communally by a group of peers. In the case of nearly every resource, it is always
owned or administered by a patron -- very often an artist himself--- who possesses
and administers the resource by virtue of a) being richer/more successful, b) belonging
to a prosperous family or c) being attached to a richer person. Thus sculptor
and sound artist Lirio Salvador was the sole signatory of the lease of the
gallery and event space known as Espasyo
Siningdikato, and did not collect contributions towards its expenses. In
the same vein, Terminal Garden, a space
which hosted residencies, concerts, performances, and workshops, was the family
residence of its director Tengal Drilon. The gallery/event space/studio known
as Green Papaya is owned and financed
solely by the visual artist Norberto “Peewee” Roldan. The furniture fabrication
company Bespoke occasionally manufactures
objects for artists, but only and solely at the discretion of its director
Jeremy Guiab.
It is worth relating that Tsinelas Labs attempted to
transplant the communally-run hackerspace structure to Manila. It closed in
less than six months as a result of a lack of subscribers. On the other hand, the
Philrobotics Philippine Electronics and Robotics Enthusiasts Club was founded
in 2010 and is still going strong as a consequence of being able to use a room
rent-free in the offices of E-gizmo, an electronics parts store specializing in
sensors, microcontrollers, and industrial automation components, whose owner is
a founding member of the club.
The second characteristic is:
·
Physical
spaces are constantly in flux.
Spaces are constantly being started, ended, opened, closed,
initiated and abandoned. As of this writing, the aforementioned Terminal Garden
closed in December of 2015, when the house was turned over to new owners. By
the same token, the painters/sound artists Pow Martinez and Manny Megrino built/are
building home-recording studios in their residences that they plan to open to friends
and collaborators. The art collective WALA (Windang Aesthetics Labor Army,
whose acronym means “Nothing” and whose practice centers on public interventions
with a heavy media art/performance aspect)
effectively spent a four-month residency in 2015 at an abandoned horse stable that the UP Diliman made available for their use. This residency that ended when the
stables’ electrical supply was cut off. Because the art made
at these spaces currently generates next to no income, these spaces are always dependent
on the existence of a disposable surplus. As these surpluses are always in
danger of drying up or being channeled to more profitable ends, (the more so if
they are formally owned collectively, as for instance by the patron’s family) artists’
access to these spaces is often short-lived.
Finally:
·
Cooperation
and sharing is based less on physical locations, formal membership and communal
ownership than on networks of personal relationships that facilitate arrangements
-- ad hoc, temporary, informal, and improvised -- that determine how surpluses
are deployed, exceptions made, and fees reduced or even eliminated.
Some detail regarding WALA’s practices may go some way in
illuminating this particular notion. It is a difficulty specific to improvised
arrangements that they can appear as trivial or inessential, even to those who make and depend on these
arrangements. Certainly my own practice, and that of my band/noise
collective The Children of Cathode Ray --riddled as they are with
such jerry-rigged transactions, did not prevent me from initially characterizing
the current landscape as “experiencing a drought in shared spaces” until the
curator Merv Espina suggested to me that in the Philippine context, physical
spaces might be a secondary consideration –one among many resources generated by
social relationships. I understand that shifting the focus from physical spaces
to social arrangements complicates the conversation. However, if art relies
primarily on these arrangements in order to exist and function, then these
arrangements, however archipelagic, multifarious, changeable, tangled and
hard-to-talk-aboutable, -- these arrangements have to be acknowledged as the primary
and essential infrastructure. The discourse must adapt to reality.
WALA is a loose collective of some eight core members, who
wish not to be named as they consider
the collective to be the primary artistic entity. As has been noted, they focus
primarily on public actions/interventions, though this focus generates a
variety of media and objects, including videos, zines, musical/noise
instruments and sound recordings. In terms of where they operate, they work and
meet primarily at 3 locations:
1)
In Green Papaya in Quezon City, where two of the
members –a couple-- live as formally employed assistants of the visual artist
Norberto Roldan. The two members live in the upper floor, which also serves as
their studio.
2)
In a house in Mandaluyong that functions as the
offices and storage rooms of Avante Garde Greeting Cards, where another of
WALA’s core group —a friend of the
company’s owner—lives. The offices are equipped with a rather gorgeous
copier/scanner/color printer, which WALA is suffered to use.
3)
In an abandoned horse stable -- still open to
the elements – on the grounds of the University of the Philippines in Quezon
City. The stable was given over to the use of artists as part of the Project
Bakawan Art Festival in February of 2015. WALA used the space as meeting room and
gallery and staged sound/media performances there until electrical power became
unavailable in late May of the same year. It is interesting to note that they effectively shared
the space with JKS -- a fraternity/gang based in a nearby village that had
co-opted the abandoned stables before UP management invited WALA to use the
stables during an art festival -- whose members still maintained a proprietary
view of the premises.
These details illustrate that the group’s practice relies heavily
on resources that they have access to by virtue of personal relationships. This access often becomes another resource
that they in turn share out to their friends, such as to the Cavite-based sound
artist Erick Calilan, who stores sound equipment in the living
quarters of the Green Papaya contingent of WALA.
These details suggest that in Manila (and possibly in the
Philippines) it might be more appropriate to frame the notion of ‘production
space’ in terms of a space of
production opportunities, rather than
in terms of physical real estate. In spite of the word “real” of “real estate” pre-loading
the notion of physical space with primary significance, I would argue that a
serious investigation of how art is actually produced cannot presuppose that it
knows what it is looking for, lest it run the danger of discounting something
essential just because it does not accord with one’s prejudices. Sometimes
the essential is invisible to the eye; and I believe that the more abstract and
dynamic notion of socially-generated “opportunity space” must be considered as the primary and
enabling space in which equipment and resources are shared by Manila’s media
artists.
-END-
Note: A SLIGHTLY shorter version of this article was previously published in a.m. post, issue 115
