Finding the absences in 'Nothing to Declare'

What might not have occurred to anyone who saw the call for submissions for the project “Nothing to Declare” was how big it could be. And when I say big, I mean huge; I mean in terms of the kind of space it would require, in terms of the kind of curatorial agency it would be premised on. 

 

Across the two museums and one gallery that carried the exhibit, the one that’s still running is at Yuchengco Museum—a good thing too, if we are to consider the kind of context it necessarily has there: in the company of the Botong Franciscos and the Juan Lunas, given too the ceiling to floor installation of falling paper rocks “Suspended Garden” by Tony Gonzales and Tes Pasola, that the museum has kept from an exhibit in 2010.  

For if the point of “Nothing to Declare” as a project was to highlight our perennially changing notions of space and absence and loss in experiences rendered different by acts of movement and migration and inequality, then here where the weight of the Lunas and Franciscos can be had, the counterpoint to the transience is glaring. And this is ultimately what makes the trip to the Yuchengco Museum worth it. 

 

Granted that Alma Quinto’s “House of Comfort” might turn off, seeming as it does to be a tad bit too grade-school project for comfort, the fact of abuse at its core getting lost in the visuals of color and community rebuilding. But walk past that and go up to the second floor and find Josephine Turalba’s “Ecdysis” a grand installation taking up most of one wall, the molting that it speaks of happening to what looks like the folk Filipino mythical manananggal. The torso visibly concrete vis-à-vis the flimsiness of arms that become wings, tails that reach the floor, all larger than the body. Made of spent gun bullets, the power of “Ecdysis” is not only in the violence that this necessarily equates with change, but maybe even more so the fact that it is rendered vis-à-vis a larger-than-life fictional creature. 

“Hardin ng Kalikasan” by Joey Cobcobo meanwhile is a life-size traditional banca, elevated off the floor and cut in half by a bright red wall. One half of it is just as red, battered and woebegone, surrounded by fishing nets and spools, the other half whole and in stark white papier-mâché, with greeting cards on the floor. That both halves necessarily speak of the movement that the banca represents is default; that these halves render the notions of absence differently, one in terms of age and use, the other in terms of distance is the point. 

 

Turalba’s other installation “I’m Coming Home” meanwhile, occupies a whole corner of the museum’s second floor, and seemed too contrived if not cheesy because it was too literal a portrayal of longing and anticipation. Words that speak of such are in chalk and pencil against black and white walls, a video on loop, charcoal and an undressed figure (we know because the dress is on the floor) creating an imagining of loss and longing and transience that was uncomfortable at most. 

 

But right outside is a wall filled with Sol Kjok’s “Nine Nights/Successive Shifts” a beautiful amalgamation of one woman, moving from youth to age and death, where the latter forms into a ball of her body repeated in different poses, until it reaches the most aged of her at the center. Nine nights is a ritual for mourning and death, when the spirit is presumed to be lingering and saying goodbye, where the ritual is for those left behind as they tell stories of the one who passed, a necessary taking stock of a life gone, one that in Kjok’s work resonates as words but also as the unsaid. The body pushes itself through the years, the body as the one that remains but also the one that cannot stand for the life that’s lived. The body as figure here is rendered gracefully even when aged, precisely because it ages. 

 

The same kind of detail taken to aging is true as well for “Kapos” by Errol Balcos, a simple enough charcoal image of the face of an old man, looking blankly and away and questioningly all at the same time, mouth open, the lines on his face not just about age but also difficulty and poverty. On the same canvas is a younger version of this old man, thin and dirty, shirtless with ribs showing, a face scrunched up in agony. The distance of age bridged by the sameness that is here, the fact that nothing changes, that what is “not enough” is proven precisely by a lifetime.

A set of video installations also deals with this kind of (un-)changing identities, some better than others. “Me Myself and I in the Age of Download” by Thomas Kutschker is a repeating moving image of a man going down a flight of stairs, each one shifting from a standard image to one that becomes more and more pixelated until the man is barely seen. Dada Docot’s “Sunday Escapes” is a film of a Sunday spent by overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) at leisure and in relation to each other, as they occupy a space informally, yet with the weight of both their longing for home, and the need for togetherness. Ruth Schreiber’s “One Man’s Journey, Rupture and Repair” meanwhile is a haunting paean to the identities that we cannot remove, or deny, no matter the years that pass. The movie begins with the camera focused on a Holocaust prisoner’s camp serial number, which slowly shifts to a wide shot that reveals a family around someone who turns out to be a grandfather. The fact of the future that this proves, even as the past is indelibly on his skin, is altogether touching and painful. 

 

It would be the installation of two works though, “Ovoid/Void” by Nikki Luna and “Untitled” by Hanna Pettyjohn that infinitely fascinated. Pettyjohn’s wooden arrows seemed to have been randomly scattered and inevitably pointed in various and differing directions. These could be stepped on, like stepping stones that lead nowhere, even as the arrows would insist on direction. Scattered alongside these wooden arrows were fiberglass egg trays filled with eggs made of resin, stark white and also asking to be stepped on, like a version of walking on egg shells, literally, if not a tribute to the flimsy and unstable ground we all stand on. Together, Luna’s and Pettyjohn’s installations create a space where we are only as good as what our feet stand on, where stabilities—be these about knowing where to go or taking decisive steps—are everything and imagined, where the absence of one concrete path is precisely the presence of possibility. 

 

Right here might be the biggest gift of “Nothing to Declare.” For here in these spaces of absence made apparent by art, here in the notions of missing and longing, there is created a real and concrete space of possibility. Not necessarily for change (for that would be cliché) but maybe for discourse, for the things we do not discuss for fear that once we declare the absences we live with, that what is present will be questioned. For fear that as we insist on where we are present, we will admit to our own instabilities and uncertainties about being and knowing what’s here. Because what we are without might ultimately be the point. –KG, GMA News

 

“Nothing to Declare” runs at the Yuchengco Museum (RCBC Plaza,  Ayala cor. Sen. Gil Puyat Avenues, Makati City) until January 29, 2012.