atlas(t): galleon trade edition

diablo rosso

oday was going to be Art Day number one, the idea being that I would go to the Museum of Contemporary Art, get grounded in what's what in Panamanian Art Now, and then ask the attendants where to go for good galleries.

Well, that got shot to Hell instantly. My cousin Ligia came to pick me and my folks up and we drove down there only to find that the Museum was closed for installation. I'd looked it up on the web but the site had no English version and the last exhibition listed ended on July 20. I figured they simply hadn't updated it yet and there would be something along on July 21 to fill the gap. Right?

Wrong. Turns out, the big Panama art museum takes over two weeks to install a show: the next exhibition opens the day I leave.

No problem; Ligia took us over to the Panamanian Cultural Institute, which has a gallery of Panamanian artists on the first floor ... which was also closed for installation of a show that is to open after we leave. WTF? Did they declare a no-art week and not tell us?

Poor Ligia told me she's not big on art, but she valiantly took me (after dropping my drooping folks off) to find the only two galleries she could think of. The first was an upscale couch art place. I found it interesting to see how Panamanian couch art runs heavily along the surrealist/harlequin/Picasso-cubist line. I tried to express this in non-art-fuck terms, and probably failed. Then the second one she couldn't find at all.

Finally, in desperation, she took me to a little place she suddenly thought of that she seemed to imagine wouldn't appeal to me. (She was apologetic the whole time we were there.) At last, we were hitting the mark, though.

This was Diablo Rosso (whose website also doesn't list exhibitions, and whose myspace page is even more useless), a contraction of every pre-gentrification, hipster/artist/DIY maker storefront-cum-hangout-cum-party-we-space I've gotten comfortable in, in my last young adulthood or so. Yeah, the world is scary and cultural capital is a universal currency.

It's a (or part of a) free-standing building with a very apparent graffiti mural along the driveway wall (apparent because--as I realized in that moment--there's no graffiti in Panama, at least, that I've seen so far). Inside there's a store with three rooms, selling the usual DIY lifestyle fare: t-shirts, purses, curios. These, of course, have a Panamanian twist, especially the purses woven out of what would have formerly been gum-pack-wrappers, but are now maps, tickets, cigarette packets, etc. Very ironic third world. I like that a lot.

Behind the store is a cafe/gallery (with no one manning the counter) featuring the work of one Jonathan Harker, who turns out later to have represented Panama in the 200? Venice Biennale. Okay, here we are, I thought. I bought some of his postcards.

It's the usual place, folks. There's one in every minor cosmopolis. Now I know where to go the next time I come to Panama and need art tips. If there are any art tips to be had. Perhaps I'd better go back later this visit, although they already pointed me to another gallery called Mateo Sariel on 74th in San Francisco neighborhood, which I will try to find later.

stephanie syjuco and body double

Video stolen wholesale from www.stephaniesyjuco.com. Double-click to play.

hildhood is a distant country for everyone, a place of proverbial and metaphorical nostalgia. Most of us learn in adolescence that something is not right about ourselves, and we drive those things we found it so easy to be underground.

Artists especially have to spend their apprenticeship fighting their way back to childhood insights and personality quirks merely to find an authentic voice---to ground themselves in who they actually are and to dissipate the clouds of who they are taught to be. This is why autobiography is so essential and ubiquitous among learning artists. This is not news.

So when a child starts out to be someone--starts to learn a language, a way of dressing and thinking and behaving, a way of making noise in the world--and then has to change all of those things to continue growing up in a new culture ... well, it causes a quiet cataclysm. Idiom becomes stunted, often, and the child becomes a person permanently chasing after the right language to use to say, "I am."

I spent the year most children spend collecting complete sentences speaking my own language, an idiosyncratic mixture of English and Cantonese that drew vocabulary, grammar, and tones from each in an unusual pattern. When I left off and emerged speaking English, the Cantonese faded away. Well into adulthood, whenever I heard someone speaking Cantonese in public, a ghost self emerged, a sort of presence behind my left shoulder, that understood what was being said, and was connected to me, but could only communicate to me a sense of fading rightness in the sounds of the language.

It's like a parallel universe. When your childhood in one culture is broken off, the person that child would have become in that culture is broken off. But that no-longer-possible-person remains with you as an echo of yourself you can either choose to ignore, or attempt to build a sound-box around, to see if they have something interesting to say. If you choose--as I have--to chase after that echo, you'll never be satisfied, or triumphant, in boxing that voice. You're chasing a nostalgia for an alternate universe, depicting a world that your audience will never be able to see, and perhaps never realizes is there to be seen.

And then, of course, as adults we see the exotiphilia, or fetish for tribalism, or lust for otherness, that strangers will ground in the cultures we left behind. We don't fit into these visions, but even in the most egregious expressions we see small corners of the alternate universe. And we're angry and sad and speechless that someone else could appropriate the little nests of our echoes to say something that annihilates them.

This is how I'm reading Stephanie Syjuco's Body Double pieces. She composed them before we went to Manila, but I first saw one of these on someone's laptop in The Living Room while we were there, and all our talk, and thinking, about distance and culture of origin wove itself into my reading. I got to see a display of three of these pieces at the opening of Mills Art Museum's show We Interrupt Your Program tonight.

Each piece in the video triptych shows excerpts from a Hollywood Vietnam war movie filmed in the Philippines. Stephanie muted the sound and put black boxes over the images that turned the Philippine landscape into Vietnam. What's left is small glimpse of jungle or hills or skies or rainfall--the sorts of small moments and images brought back, Proust-like, when we smell rain or foliage, or eat something we haven't eaten since we were children.

The monolithic blank forms interrupting the landscape are nothing so simple as Western brute technology or political iron-fisting, or even colonization. At the risk of interpreting one-for-one: the hard, black boxes are maybe memory loss, or maybe just the places that never got filled in. Or the big, ugly swaths of the here-and-now we have to cover up to let the echoes gain some volume. Stephanie said tonight, looking at her own work up on the wall, that it was an exercise in minimalism. I think it an attempt to contain lushness in minimalism, something resounding loudly in Woff's new piece (yes, I will blog about it).

leah cabullo

Detail from Jenifer Wofford's Kandingan, 2004.

oday I paid a visit to Galleon Trade captain Jenifer Wofford's home studio. More will be posted soon about La Woff, but there was one strangely lovely story that came out today that needs to be on this blog.

Apparently, in the spring of 2000, a southern Philippine Islamic terrorist group staged a mass kidnapping from a beach resort on Sipadan. The hostages were held for ransom for months, while the kidnappers dragged them around the jungle ahead of the Philippine authorities and added to their number with further kidnappings.

But in July 2000, one of the newly added hostages, a German woman with a complex of medical conditions that made her captivity a matter of life and death--even if her captors had not been capable of beheading her--became a minor local cause celebré, being the cause of a defingerization.

A freelance script writer named Leah Cabullo, who was on Jolo island, where the hostages had been taken, along with a passel of journalists, decided one night to

cut off a piece of her left middle finger and use her blood to write a letter appealing to Islamic extremists to free an ailing German woman among 40 hostages held in a southern Philippine jungle.

... Cabullo, a Manila-based freelance writer in her 30s, refused to leave her rented room at a retreat house in downtown Jolo and spoke with other journalists covering the 80-day standoff through a window. Blood was scattered at the lobby outside her room.

"I cut my finger as a sign of deep sincerity," she said.

The letter appealed for the release of 56-year-old German housewife Renate Wallert, ... who suffers from hypertension, a chronic anxiety disorder and other ailments.

Rosa Banagudos, a caretaker at the retreat house, said Cabullo was rushed to the Sulu provincial hospital for treatment after the bizarre act. The detached portion of the left middle finger was placed in a bottle filled with alcohol.

"I was still sleeping when I heard her scream," Banagudos said. "I rushed to her room and saw her hand bloodied. I didn't see what she used to cut her finger."

According to a friend of Cabullo, the severed portion of the finger would be sent to Robot and Susukan with the appeal letter, written in blood on white linen paper. The offering would be delivered by a courier sometime on Tuesday.

Note: "Robot" was the nickname of the terrorist commander. Delicious, no?

There's not much else to be found about this story on the internet, in any language. I even checked the Filipino Google, but no dice. Not even any follow-ups, although you'd think that the press would fall all over themselves to find out if it worked.

And the funny thing is, according to Woff, it did work. All the stuff I found chez interwebs about the hostage crisis never mentioned Cabullo as a reason, but Renate Wallert was released less than two weeks after Cabullo's sacrifice. This article attributes that to payment of a ransom, but her husband and son remained with the kidnappers until a month later (for the husband), and nearly two months later (for the son). It's not clear how much ransom money played a part in the men's releases.

This article from Asia Week has only confusion to report about Renate Wallert's release:

The 85th day dawned with the release of the first Westerner, ailing German Renate Wallert. The Europeans say neither they nor Libya agreed at the time to pay a ransom for Wallert. In the Philippine and German press, it was reported that $1 million was paid. Sources allege Aventajado raised $1 million through local businessmen and sent Dragon to make the payment. They also allege Aventajado asked Germany for a refund, but that officials refused. Aventajado denies all of the above: "That is not true."

The article doesn't mention Cabullo.

Well can I believe that Cabullo got Renate released ... and well, too, can I understand Woff's fascination with the story--which prompted her to center her installation Kandingan around a drawing of the only photograph she could find of Leah Cabullo ... holding up her maimed hand.

There's something inside that wants an extreme act like this to be able to affect people. I'd just call someone like Cabullo crazy to the creepyth degree. But then, if you're dealing with Islamic fundamentalist kidnapping beheaders--who risk their lives and international relations for arbitrarily chosen ransom sums, and then waste statesmen's time bickering over how to divvy up the take--how do you prove your sincerity, really, truly?

None of this stuff--terrorism, kidnappings, beheadings--is really capable of shocking anyone anymore. It's too commonplace and understandable ... or else too commonplace and permanently beyond understanding. What's shocking is that a civilian figured out how to speak terrorese from the point of view of the powerless. It seems crazy, but it also seems like she was the only who got through--or cared to get through.

Between a crazywoman and a transported, orgasmic Saint Theresa-type, Cabullo wants to strike me as the latter. Catholic redemptions are not far from the imagination when thinking about weird Filipino phenomena, for obvious reasons. Something wants there to be the closest thing we have in real life to magical realism: some kind of inspired, gritty communication, some kind of understanding-beyond-understanding, to exist in fanatical jungles and distant motherlands.

How strange and beautiful and creepy such things are. I wonder what she's doing now. I hope she hasn't been declared mentally incompetent.

my pinay name

o appropriate on so many levels.

My Pinoy Name is Claudia Ligaya Little Bit Quilong-quilong.
Take The Filipino Name Generator today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

how not to defeat jetlag/spark

rink wine, in an effort to make yourself "sleepy" (i.e. drunk.)

It won't make you sleepy.

So posting will have to start again later this week, once I've gotten over my own idiocy and settled back into my dayjob. Yes, I'm back in the Bay Area.

In the meantime, please enjoy the send off filmmaker Romeo Candido gave us in the last days of our Philippine sojourn. If you're attentive, you can catch a flash of me sitting in chair at the beginning:

And here's a more formal version of the same song:

cebu thriller

oly shit.

Independent of this whole Philippines trip, one of our number was sent a link to this vid of Filipino inmates in Cebu doing "Thriller" in their prison yard.

Words nearly fail me. Nearly. (Do words ever really fail me?)

Context: Sunday night after the final Galleon Trade event at The Living Room, the Galleon Traders scared off the remainder of the audience and had an iTunes dance night. At one point, someone put "Thriller" on, someone else got the original "Thriller" video off of YouTube and projected it on the wall, and Carlos showed us his Michael Jackson moves (excellent).

We thought we were so clever ... until today. This video is so quintessentially Filipino--as I understand it, from this trip--that I can hardly explain it. American prisoners do angry, heartfelt spoken word ... or they study law. Filipino prisoners do group choreography to "Thriller". Awesome.

me tarzan, you jane

wo new terms:

Diaspora Freeze: the way a culture or aspects of a culture freeze in time or progression in a diaspore community. Separated from the culture of origin, the markers of the culture of origin cease to be facets of a living culture. They freeze into symbols, or orthodox usages whose integrity confers authenticity upon those who maintain it.

Examples would be the Elizabethan English spoken by some Canadian islanders, or the failure of Latin American Spanish to pronounce "c" as "th" (a linguistic shift that happened in Europe since the establishment of Spanish colonies in the new world). This also happens with politics, as with Cuban Americans who emigrated during the revolution, or evidenced by statues of Sun Yat Sen in Chinatowns all over the world.

Diaspora Drift: the distance between the frozen diaspore culture and the progressed culture of origin.

For example, the now-capitalistic regime of China compared to the nationalistic, Taiwan-orientation of earlier generations of Chinatown immigrants.

***

We came up with this walking back from one of the hugest indoor malls I've ever seen yesterday. (Apparently, this one is only moderately large for Filipino standards.) Stephanie said there must be a sociological term for this and I suggested we just make one up. Thus. So.

***

Romeo shows off his Tagalog, which Stephanie praises. No, he says, it flows, but he speaks "like a three year old caveman."

I joke in the background that that's what my Chinese sounds like, "me Tarzan, you Jane." But there it is, the looooong streeeeeetch between origin and diaspore, where the connective tissue grows thinner with each succeeding--not generation--but year.

Where the gesture or phrase that I know has to stand still---to stand in for the living way, a consensus molding of every word and moment, that happens back in the motherland with what is supposed to be our shared culture. But I have no membership in this daily shaping. I have to freeze it to keep it and they have to change it to keep it alive.

*** update

Mike tells us that when talking to cabbies, he speaks like a ten-year-old, which is when he left the Philippines. That doesn't fly, though. They don't like being told what to do by someone who uses ten-year-old manners. They prefer it when he butches up a bit. Hmmm ...