metropolis m

Four months prior to this writing, in mid-July, I’d come home from a workshop in the Czech Republic. It had been a small gathering of artists, critics, curators, and academics from Eastern Europe, Greece, Spain, Southeast Asia and Latin America for an event that took place alongside the launching of a book called The Transformation Atlas (published by the Prague-based not-for-profit organization ‘tranzit’).The book launch and workshop were part of a larger undertaking called Monument to Transformation 1989-2009 which included exhibition components in two sites in the city. With the air hanging heavy with references to the variously-hued European people’s revolts that commonly get cited alongside the now two-decade-old fall of the Berlin Wall, our workshop sought the exchanging of ideas about the representation and articulation of transformation processes. It was not too difficult to figure out that I, along with the Korean scholar Jy Moon were de facto Asia, that is even if she had, by then, primarily been working out of Europe for some time.I bring up this motley coming together because I believe it was no accident that at the end of two intense days, past the mistranslations, jet lag, less than optimal concentration levels, et al., it was evident that despite our nodding recognition of affinities (largely non-violent, spontaneous protest actions deposing totalitarian governments within the last 20 years), in the end, we still knew so little about each of our nuanced contexts. Of course some degree of the universal comes on board at assemblies of this sort – tanks being stopped in their tracks, once imposing monuments being hogtied into submission, parcels of city spaces being occupied and even momentarily re-territorialized, etc. But by and large, it was a largely preliminary exercise of composing upon a functionally bare canvas, each of us telling stories in registers (academic, diaristic, anecdotal, performative, and in all manner of hybrids in between) only we could individually account for, about how we saw and thought that we knew. Perhaps that really is all you can expect out of these, however earnestly, staged recollections. Personally, I’d come with a despondent rant. EDSA 1, alternately called the Philippine’s People’s Power revolution by middle forces and a mere uprising by the left and left-of-center, turned 24 years old this year. In that short time that has elapsed, some five generations of Filipinos were reared under competing interpretations of those fateful days that led up to Ferdinand Marcos’s finally getting the boot after two decades of strongman rule. As a teacher encountering students in their mid-teens, reckoning with their inability to remember or worse, their willingness to block off what’s become too difficult to tangle with, proves so painful that there are days when all that you’re able to do is throw your hands in the air and heave a debilitating sigh, well maybe apart from launching into a full blown but still largely futile dissertation about how martial law attempted to turn our generation into placid automatons daily pledging allegiance to the New Society and paying homage to Imelda Marcos’s dedication to The True, The Good, and the Beautiful.What has in fact survived the cynicism and disappointment engendered by post-Marcos regimes are the most mediagenic fragments of these spectacles of fraught democracy – yellow merchandise from ribbons, shirts, to umbrellas; a martyr’s spectacled mien turned fetish festooning vehicle license plates, stickers, bags and key chains; an unapologetic We-are-the-Worldish music video celebrating the Filipino’s gift to the world (Handog ng Pilipino sa Mundo) complete with recording studio scenes spliced against massive concentrations of civilians supposedly blind to differences in class, ethnicity and creed throwing themselves bodily into the fray which pit church against state, ignorance versus experience, party politics versus D-I-Y organizing – all these ultimately playing into how the Philippines was propelled to albeit fleeting global popularity in 1986. It was not very long after this when Corazon Aquino, widow of Marcos’s erstwhile arch enemy, Benigno Aquino Jr. was hailed by TIME Magazine as Person of the Year. Such is the kitschy tenor of annual EDSA commemorations and run-of-the-mill social studies reports in classrooms across the country’s islands. They are undeniably caricaturish of what it took for people long kowtowed into complaisance to finally tap into residual, sublimated anger. But that wasn’t even half of what I’d put on the table in that Prague workshop. By the ’90s, the Marcoses had emerged from exile and had fully re-established their political reign in their home province of Ilocos in northern Philippines. Ferdinand’s widow, Imelda made a bid for the presidency but mercifully lost. Brandwise, she has since evolved into an arguably global pop icon for flamboyance and the incorrigibly vain and loopy. Two of her eldest children are now sitting in the lower house of Congress, and up through August, talk about the only Marcos son running for a national post was hitting the front pages again. Every few years since the Marcoses returned to roost, comes the persistent buzz about how Ferdinand’s preserved corpse undeniably deserves its rightful place within the country’s modest but most hallowed of gravesites, next to National Scientists, National Artists, be-medalled soldiers, etc. He was President after all, they argue, billions amassed and 75,000 political prisoners notwithstanding.So perhaps it is not just a streak of mid-age gripe that’s made me this overly cautious about flippant celebratory ventures that conveniently forget how victories come soiled with blood, metaphorically and otherwise. At the completely imaginable risk of playing the grinch, let me put myself out there and insist that remembering (and its unavoidable recourse to re-constructions) is very much about who is crafting the reminiscence and is far too often, just one shade off of forgetting. Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez is a curator and art critic. She lives and works in Manilla and teaches in the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Phillipines.