A Friday meeting
Posted by: Fats in: PagtatanghalLast Friday morning was a wonderful opportunity to sit down and talk with the members of the Committee on Visual Arts of the NCCA, thanks to Cris Rollo who invited me to present my work and perspectives (Curating: Cure for the Soul) 
as part of their curator lecture series. My most recent work with Cris and the CVA was the WebSining Digital Art competition. Although Cris has invited me to present at the CVA meeting two months ago (to which I had to beg off because it was immediately after the opening of the WebSining exhibition at the Met and I was completely exhausted), it was only about 3 days before the recent meeting was I informed by the NCCA about presenting on Friday. Such short notice proved to be very beneficial because it forced me to clearly outline and simplify my presentation (and I have a tendency to ramble, and to write in a convoluted and complex manner).
So, Friday’s meeting and presentation was another learning experience for me: I learned to write simpler and clearer outlines and to explain myself with greater clarity (although I am yet to learn to be more explicit and to draw out more vividly the connections and relationships between concepts and instances that I mention in my presentations). I also learned to listen and analyse questions more carefully, because questions are very important and are the entry point for discussion which needs to be encouraged.
I also learned more about my own curating experience - on both the personal and more professional levels. In preparation for the meeting, I had to sit down and think back many years to the time when I was a little girl involved in the pleasurable activities which now constitute my approaches to art and curating: (1) collecting (cigarette packets and bottle crowns); (2) organizing and arranging/re-arranging (sounds recorded from my favorite television programs); (3) marketing and selling (bottled herbal cures that I created from the garden in our backyard); and (4) creating and contextualizing (making drawings and writings and hiding them in between Youngster magazine pages).
Later experiences in elementry and highschool were more socially involved, and these, I thought, influenced my current social approach to curating: (1) creating, contextualization and simulation (making science fiction drawings and plays based on real people in school); (2) simulation and social organization (bringing people from school together, especially those with the appropriate resources and talents, to perform music); (3) corresponding and publishing in print (I established a group called the Alternative Poets Society and published members’ poetry and criticisms through a newsleter called “RU486″); corresponding and publishing electronically (through the Bulletin Board Systems or BBSs, I put together CyberPoets Society or CPS, and published members’ poetry in an electronic and interactive format with sound and images using Macromedia Action).
Lessons learned from this early personal history were: (1) Documentation is important in the “curatorial” process of analysis and synthesis; (2) “Creating” is more intellectually and spiritually fulfilling than “marketing” or “collecting”; (3) “Collecting” may become meaningful and fulfilling when the responsibility for its articulation (and not merely its product) is shared.
Then I tried looking into my more “professional” history of “curating.” I put “professional” and “curating” in quotes because I was never really trained formally in curatorial practice, and thus I often refer to these concepts on a more personal level and have developed my own personal perspectives of these concepts.
Anyway, my “professional” history consist of projects that I have drawn together within 2000-2004 - all of which involve digital media. Experiences related to the concept and process of curating digital media in virtual spaces were: (1) Collecting to explore an unfamiliar terrain (such as FOCUS.01); (2) organizing to explore differentiated terrains (such as Geocentricity, the Earth as Center); and (3) creating and contextualizing to explore ideas and responses to ideas (Gimokud the Melting Soul).
Experiences related to curating between physical and virtual spaces involve: (1) Within the context of education (such as the Digital Media Festivals which I organized at the UPCFA from 2000-2003); (2) within a contemporary art and institutional context (such as Decode at the Ateneo Art Gallery, and Katawan Satti for Multimedia Art Asia Pacific in Singapore); and (3) exploiting electronic distribution/networks in and between spaces (such as the CD-ROM based DMF2003 and Mga Wika ng Liwanag for InteractivA03).
Lessons learned from this more “professional” history were: (1) Commercial interests often corrupt creativity into consumerism; (2) Dialogues among artists need to be encouraged by creating a “safe space” where a diversity of languages can develop; and (3) People in institutions can make a difference – but, must take care not to marginalize vibrant life forms outside of the institutional framework.
At this point, I also started to think about the self-imposed abstinence on any curatorial activities in 2005, and the new experience gained from curating WebSining in March 2006. In this introspection and the synthesis of my past personal and professional histories, I drew together these future directions and challenges: (1) The source and flow of knowledge and capital is crucial to creativity and self-determination; (2) The relationship between culture and economy (body, or katawan at ginhawa) need to be openly discussed and debated; and (3) If language is the medium by which concepts are internalized and externalized, then it must constitute a very significant aspect of the creative process. Language involves a linguistic conscientiousness underlying the function of “creating” something instead of “buying” something. It is as a strategic behavior that empowers people to “create” or to “build” rather than to “buy.” Language is a truly creative process of building and creating, a technological process congruent with life force (bisà) and ecological balance (kalíkásan), rather than a commercial process obsessed with capital accumulation and waste.
As I have written earlier in Articulation: Cure for Curators: Seen as an exercise in articulation (in the vernacular and not in the language of “international art”), curating can genuinely be transformed and be transformative: the curator (curatus) as one traditionally charged with the cure of souls, perhaps the catalonan / babaylan / shaman, who, in this day and age, should be charged first and foremost with the cure of her own soul.
I am still thinking of the questions and discussions taken up at the CVA meeting/presentation (which I will write about later), and I am very grateful to the CVA members for being involved. I am also grateful to Trevor Batten for accompanying me to the meeting/presentation, for bringing forth the issues and anxieties of the “western” and the “international” perspective. I wish for the dialogues to continue, to soon be able to visit the CVA members in Visayas and Mindanao - and to know more about different “personal histories” of “curating” that is owned by the cultures of their communities.
