DEC13_SUPERDUPERFINAL

Visayas Elsewhere
by Patrick Flores
The artists I chose for the exhibition Kalibutan: The World in Mind
signify practices that locate and migrate the Visayas elsewhere,
away from the islands, but threaded through them, redolent of
them, distanced from them, approaching them, missing them, reencountering
them.
The poetics of distance is the politics of memory: how to evoke
the Visayas at sea, in the erstwhile colonial empire of Europe, in
the vicinity of a copious Pacific, through queer folklore and the
proverbial neon, reciprocity of gifts, changing dioramas crafted in
Manila but reminiscent of Bohol.
A case in point: Joar Songcuya. His work in the field of painting is
part of a larger context of rendition. It is a rendition of his remarkable
lifeworld as a sailor, a marine engineer, and an overseas contract
worker, alongside his being a son and a brother. He has had the rare
opportunity to navigate three of the world’s most prominent bodies
of water: the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Arctic. This exceptional
oceanography surrounds what can only be the liquescent practice of
Songcuya.
It is in this light that in order to round out our understanding of
his work, we need to look into the other materials in the repertoire
of his sensible production, or the production of sensuous particulars
such as diary entries; photographs; videos; and early painting. This
repertoire is not just a mere backdrop. It is, in fact, both the ecology
and subject of his paintings. Songcuya is an autodidact artist who
has recently decided to formally learn the fine arts after already
gathering a corpus of pieces and exhibiting in galleries.
The relationship between these forms and his painting is intricate.
It complicates the typology of these materials and the curatorial
method with which to flesh it out. These materials lend themselves
to both proto- and para-curatorial schemes in the sense that they
provide research milieu, on the one hand, and they initiate more
conversations beyond the exhibitionary object, on the other.
These then are the context and constitution of Songcuya’s lively
work.
110