DEC13_SUPERDUPERFINAL

of? These are just musings and questions to which I have no clear
answer but which I feel must be part of reflecting on the curatorial
process in a time that has become more and more dependent upon
virtual space as a site of exhibition making and engagement.
Also part of my rumination on the relations between the collaborative
and the curatorial is the idea of caring. Etymologically, “curation”
from the Latin curatus, means “care” and caring is indeed an act of
“laboring together.” By this, I regard curation as an act of caring for
ideas. In our correspondences, I and the artists have been taking
care of ideas, from their germination from the artists’ imagination
to their development and recalibration through different phases
and through the changing circumstances of the last two years. For
this, the virtual mode provided an opportunity in the sense that our
conversations, chats and email threads become archives that record
the development of ideas. It was crucial to keep track of conceptual
developments because of the very elusiveness and volatility of ideas
vis-à-vis the concreteness and materiality of objects and face-toface
interactions. Throughout our correspondences, caring for ideas
also came in the form of research and the shared responsibility of
exploring concepts and perspectives related to the artists’ works.
These mostly involved suggesting readings or articles to them or
proposing to have reading sessions and exchange notes.
world is reckoned as a wet surface. And this may make sense in the
context of a group of islands which has had a history of violent
storm surges—from the recent 2013 super typhoon to way back in
the time of the 17th century Jesuit priest and chronicler Francisco
Alcina who said that in Leyte and Samar, “tall mountains of water
which form devastating waves, enter, extend areas of the land.” On an
interpretive level, the proverb is a particular articulation of resonant
tropes concerning fate: “gulong ng palad,” “wheel of fortune,”
“twist of fate,” “turn of events,” “turning the tide.” Permanence
and predictability are frustrated by the very circuitousness of
circumstances.
So aside from the circulation of ideas and roles, the exchanges and
reciprocal sympathies entailed by collaboration and caring, this idea
of “libot” signifying volatility, unpredictability, and “slippery turns”
may be engaged to think about ways of curating that develop the
sense of living with contingency.
Throughout my whole experience in VIVA ExCon, the exhibition
title Kalibutan: The World in Mind made sense more and more. How
the word kalibutan—the Visayan word for “world”—was unpacked
by head curator Patrick Flores struck me as really engaging. Any
other term for the word “world” would have been frustratingly too
broad. But the nuance of kalibutan is that it points to both “world”
and “consciousness.” In this perspective, the world is an ecology,
a set of processes and energies, and not simply a fixed, inert place.
The world takes place in the sense that it happens or comes around
through reciprocal forces. As Flores puts it, “The world is embodied,
on the one hand, and the body is enworlded, on the other.”
Thus, my response to the curatorial vision of Kalibutan has been
this rethinking of the “world” more in terms of processes than as
place. In one Waray proverb, the world is imagined not only as
geographic but choreographic: An kalibutan dalunutan (The world
is full of slippery turns). While “kalibutan” may refer to surrounding
and thus the consciousness of existence, of being in the world and
being surrounded by it, it also refers to the motion and trajectory
of “turns”—“kalibutan” as a noun translates as “turned-ness” or “the
condition of turning.” In the more literal sense of the proverb, the
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