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Contingent Kalibutan:
Notes on Curating for
VIVA ExCon 2020
by Mars Edwenson Briones
As in most other endeavors, it is the volatility of the pandemic
that has been the source of most problems and challenges in the
exhibition component of VIVA ExCon 2020. Life has been at
the mercy of the unpredictable implementation and extension of
lockdowns and travel restrictions; the fear of contracting the virus or
infecting a loved one, a colleague, or someone more vulnerable; and
other sorts of emergency. But all these uncertainties did not simply
haunt the exhibition; in most cases, they became the basis for how
the project was designed and has eventually played out.
My selection of artists for the Kalibutan exhibition, for instance,
did not happen as planned. Because there was a perceived need to
search for artists and ideas outside centers like Tacloban, the capital
of Eastern Visayas, before the pandemic part of my plan to select
artists was—hoping to cover as much of the region—to actually
travel to cities and towns in Leyte, Samar, and Biliran. But, of
course, this was to become a logistical problem when the quarantines
started limiting people’s mobility between towns. My research and
selection process, therefore, largely involved combing through social
media and the internet, asking colleagues, and forwarding the VIVA
ExCon pubmat and open call to artists. It was challenging to do it
this way because I feel like there is something unique to the rapport
you get to build from speaking with people face-to-face. And with
searching for artists virtually, there’s also the other issue you have to
face—which is not all artists have had as strong an online presence
as others. Thus, there hasn’t been a single, uniform method in
researching and selecting the artists. Some of them submitted to
the open call; one artist was recommended to me; others I got to
speak with either in person, through phone calls, Messenger, or a
combination of these.
But whatever the process, one important consideration was
how the artists’ proposals would play out, not anymore just on a
conceptual level vis-à-vis the theme of “Kalibutan,” but also on a
pragmatic level, that is, through the virtual mode by which VIVA
has been recalibrated. The works or proposals of Popo Amascual
(Tacloban) and RV Sanchez (Maasin)—the artists I worked with for
Kalibutan—both engage the virtual mode in ways that are beyond
using the virtual as mode of circulation. For example, in Amascual’s
project entitled “Hingalo,” it is not just that the audio recording
of breathing sounds is made available online, but the audience are
also encouraged to record their own breathing sounds, upload the
recordings in a Google drive folder, and listen to the audio recording
where their recordings have been overlaid with those of others. Thus,
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