Cut the Censorship, Shatter the Silence

The local Philippine censor's board, the MTRCB, has just given an X rating to a film project calling for the release of abducted (and still-missing) activist Jonas Burgos. Like a third-rate thespian, MTRCB Chairperson Consoliza Laguardia unconvincingly tries to justify this outrightly fascist gesture to the public by saying that the film was "unfair" and "undermining the faith" in the government.

You know what really reeks of unfairness and one-sidedness, Consoliza? It's the Philippine military abducting Jonas and "facilitating" his disappearance up to now. It's the Army refusing to give Jonas' own mother a copy of their "classified" report on his abduction, even at the orders of the highest court of the land. It's the AFP Commander-in-Chief remaining silent on all the killings, tortures, and disappearances attributed to her men for the past seven years.

You know who's really behind all these moves to "undermine the faith" of the people in the Philippine government, Madam Laguardia? None less than the Arroyo administration itself, by the sheer atrociousness of its actions, pronouncements and policies. While you're at it, the MTRCB should seriously consider giving the X rating to all television footage of President Arroyo's annual SONAs and rosy speeches. The last time I checked, seeing the President deliver her daily litany of lies was enough reason to spawn a new breed of destabilizers and dissenters.

I've seen the excerpts of this "X-rated" film at Cinekatipunan. The scenes are no less "unfair" and "one-sided" than the average TV commercial or news report that airs on TV. And the MTRCB need not worry about the Burgos family's filmmaker-supporters further undermining the people's faith in government through the work: that happened way before, starting from the very second Jonas was abducted by the MTRCB's fellow fascists from the military.

"Scenes in the film are presented unfairly, one-sided
and undermines the faith and confidence of the
government and duly constituted authorities, thus, not
for public exhibition."

Read that sentence again and savor the perfection of its follies! Not only is it glaringly "grammatically wrong": it' hinges on the dangerous notion that the only works fit for public consumption are the ones that affirm the status quo --this effing government!--and fit into the its appalling standards of "objectivity" and "fairness" (defined mostly by the current Justice Secretary).

While we're on the topic of censorship, I'm reposting below an article written for FOCAS: Forum on Contemporary Art and Society, as part of its country reports on art and censorship. Many more cases of suppression have piled up ever since I submitted this draft earlier this year; the MTRCB's X-rating on the Jonas Burgos film being the latest.

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The Philippines: Culturing censorship, waging political repression

The Philippines makes for an interesting study in censorial practice: from the auspices of American colonial rule to the impositions of the Marcos dictatorship, and finally to the current regime of crisis and dissent. This survey briefly cites selected aspects of censorial practices directed against Philippine cultural workers in 2006 and early 2007, including in its scope cases of state-condoned political repression against progressive artists, 'legalised' censorship involving duly-constituted government agencies and legislation, and self-censorship arising from the artist and community's adjustments to material and economic exigencies.

Sins of suppression: State-condoned political repression as a form of censorship

Censorship refers to 'the institution or practice of censoring' which, in turn, may be defined as suppression or excision of any matter 'thought to be immoral, seditious, or otherwise undesirable.'¹ While often this has been exercised against cultural works and practices, there are also cases when the artists and authors themselves—physically and materially—become the very subjects and targets of suppression.

Assaults against the body politic are, in themselves, forms of censorship. The erasure of images, words and acts pale in comparison to the erasures and even eliminations of actual living and breathing bodies: the very physical planes through which ideological interventions are enacted. Viewed from such a perspective, threats of violence, death or disappearance among the ranks of cultural workers become the most virulent and potent form of censorship there is. In the Philippine setting, such assaults take on the form of state-condoned repression against a targeted segment of the population identified with progressive politics, including cultural workers.

The documented instances of censorship and repression among cultural workers seem to be part of a more systematic state campaign against its perceived enemies and would be better viewed in the context of the current political situation, which is briefly outlined here. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who assumed the position after former President Joseph Estrada was ousted by a popular mass uprising in January 2000, has herself been called upon to resign from office by various societal sectors since 2001. These calls for Arroyo's resignation are based on continuous political scandals and allegations of graft and corruption against the President, as well as human rights violations and still-unresolved counts of massive electoral fraud in her 2004 Presidential bid (documented in voice recordings of several wiretapped conversations allegedly between Arroyo and an election commissioner; these were publicly disseminated through CDs in 2005). By the end of 2005, political rallies calling for President Arroyo's resignation had escalated, both in frequency and in scale.

The Arroyo administration, however, has responded to the calls for her resignation through intensified political repression by military, legal and administrative means. On 24 February 2006, President Arroyo issued Presidential Proclamation 1017, declaring the entire Philippines to be under a 'state of emergency' and quickly acting to quash any opposition to her administration under the pretext of cracking down on 'destabilisers' and 'terrorists'. At the same time, the number of what Philippine human rights activists have termed as 'extrajudicial killings'—assassinations of legal activists by suspected state-sponsored assassins or elements of the military—has risen to more than 832 since 2001.² Many of the human rights violations against cultural workers have occurred in what Philippine human rights activists refer to as 'militarised' areas: regions or provinces where a large concentration of military forces are deployed for counter-insurgency operations against the New Peoples Army (NPA) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The degree of political repression in the Philippines has solicited the attention of the international community, including the Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU),³ the largest international organisation of parliaments of sovereign states, and Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions.

Cultural workers associated with progressive organisations have also been victimised by this wave of overt political repression. On 28 April 2006, in Tagaytay City, Cavite in the southern Tagalog region, the Philippine police and elements from the Philippine Navy arrested without warrant and detained poet and peasant rights advocate Axel Pinpin, a 1999 Fellow for Poetry in Filipino at the University of the Philippines (UP) Institute of Creative Writing and the author of a self-published poetry folio entitled Tugmaang Walang Tugma (Rhyming Without Rhymes). He was reportedly compiling materials for a second poetry book at the time of his arrest. Also arrested and detained were four other members of the Kalipunan ng Magsasaka ng Cavite (KAMAGSASAKA-KA, or Farmers Federation in Cavite). Pinpin and his companions, collectively tagged as the 'Tagaytay Five', were physically and mentally tortured while under police custody and were charged with rebellion for 'plotting to destabilise the national government'. They are detained at Camp Vicente Lim in Laguna and have recently concluded a hunger strike as of the time of this writing.

Two days after Pinpin's arrest, on 30 April 2006, another cultural worker and peasant rights activist, Alexis Uy, was seized by military troops along with 14 farmers from the Kongreso ng Magbubukid para sa Repormang Agraryo (Peasant Congress for Agrarian Reform) in Quezon province while they were preparing for a Labour Day rally. A member of a local cultural organisation Artistang Pangkultura ng Mamalakaya sa Timog Katagalugan (APLAYA or Cultural Artists of Fisherfolks in Southern Tagalog), Uy was kept in isolated detention at the Philippine Army's Southern Luzon Command headquarters in Camp Nakar, Lucena City and later presented with the other detainees to the media as alleged NPA guerillas involved in a 'destabilisation plot'.

Uy was eventually released, but Pinpin and other cultural workers—such as sculptor, painter and community teacher Angie Bisuna Ipong—remain detained on charges of rebellion and murder. Ipong, a 62-year old peace advocate, was arrested on International Women's Day, 8 March 2005, in Misamis Occidental. She has been held incommunicado and subjected to torture, interrogation and sexual assault.⁴

The arrest of Pinpin and others shows that 'artists can not escape from the political contradictions of their time.'⁵ In a petition, the Amado Hernandez Resource Center (AVHRC), a cultural institution named after the late Filipino National Artist and trade unionist, called on the government to release Pinpin and Ipong: 'Our two cultural workers have fallen prey to political repression that victimises all those fighting for good governance, social reforms and the people's welfare'.⁶

On 22 August 2006, musician, film-maker and animator Theta Tulay, along with film-maker Bong de Leon and six other individuals of the award-winning progressive multimedia group Southern Tagalog Exposure were abducted while on a human rights fact-finding mission in Mulanay, Quezon province. The group was accosted by members of the Philippine Army's 74th Infantry Brigade while taking documentary photographs of the area. They were transferred to Camp Nakar and later released, although not without being threatened with similar charges of rebellion. Tulay's case exemplifies the experiences of activist film-makers who have experienced being directly harassed, assaulted and prevented from documenting human rights work by state or private security forces, thus being 'censored' even before finishing the production stage of their films.

On 13 September 2006, members of a community-based theatre group were arrested without a warrant and were detained by the military in Negros Occidental, an island in the western Visayas region. Members of Teatro Obrero (Workers' Theater), the cultural arm of the National Federation of Sugar Workers, were rehearsing for a performance commemorating the 20 September 1985 Escalante massacre of sugar workers⁷ when they were arrested. That same month, another organiser of Teatro Obrero was abducted along with six other individuals by the Philippine Army in Kabangkalan City, Negros Occidental, after their vehicle was accosted while passing through a military checkpoint along the road.

In Teatro Obrero's case, performances (usually an integration of dance, music, and drama) are utilised not only for 'aesthetic purposes, but also as a form of dialogue and statement [addressed] to fellow sugar workers and the hacienderos (sugar barons)'.⁸ Such harassment constitutes a deliberate attack against the intentions of the performance itself.

Progressive audio-visual groups have also been subjected to state-condoned harassment. Kodao Productions, a Manila-based film and community radio production group, was accused by a state witness of being a 'Communist propaganda unit' and had an award-winning mainstream radio program axed on the on the day that the President declared a state of national emergency in March 2006.⁹

Such forms of political harassment are tantamount to censorship as they intend to produce a 'chilling effect' or an atmosphere of intimidation on other cultural workers and citizens, who would otherwise be outraged at the impunity with which human rights violations are being committed by suspected state forces. Among media practitioners, the deaths of at least 46 Philippine journalists under the Arroyo administration have been deemed as the 'most brutal form of censorship'.¹⁰

Sins of omission: Systematic and legislated censorship

Many of the cases involving direct censorship involve the Movie, Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB), whose history as a censorial agency can be traced to the country's colonial and dictatorial past. Created by President Marcos by Presidential Decree in 1985, MTRCB is the Philippines' modern-day adaptation of the Board of Censors instituted by the post-war American colonial government. Its charter, as UP law professor Atty Victor Avecilla writes, is a 'verbatim reproduction' of the now-defunct Board of Review for Motion Pictures and Television (BRMPT) instituted under the Marcos regime.

MTRCB is essentially a censors' board whose majority is composed of Presidential appointees, who may rate and classify films and TV programmes into categories according to the age—and presumed maturity—of audiences. However, it retains the power to impose an 'X' rating on a work, thereby preventing it from public exhibition in the country.

MTRCB has been under fire from citizens for arbitrarily imposing 'X' ratings on works for mainstream audiences and even alternative films—such as Toxic Mango, a five-minute work by independent film-maker Khavn dela Cruz—for containing supposed salacious and immoral scenes.¹¹ The work was part of a project, Guimaras: Short films from the Oil Spill, by the Philippine Independent Filmmakers Cooperative, aiming to generate more public awareness of the massive October 2006 oil spill off the coast of Guimaras island in Western Visayas.

In October 2006, MTRCB came under fire from both the Philippine Senate and the House of Representatives for imposing an alleged arbitrary 'X' rating on a DVD film biography of deposed President Joseph Estrada. The rating was imposed after MTRCB reviewers declared that the work tended to 'threaten the political stability of the state' and 'undermine the faith and confidence of the people in the government', prompting Estrada to bring the case to court¹² and distribute the film via the Internet. Senators denounced MTRCB for acting as President Arroyo's 'censorship body' while Congress threatened to allot only an annual budget of 1 peso to the agency.

In August 2006, the MTRCB pressured producers of a local public affairs show on TV network ABC 5 to delete selected portions of the film Shadow, a documentary feature on the NPA and its "shadow" government existing in guerilla zones throughout the country.¹³

In light of the two aforementioned cases, it seems that MTRCB has wielded its censorial privilege against the perceived political opponents of the current administration. 'There is indeed a trend right now for the MTRCB to be used in preventing the spread of what the powers-that-be deem as counter-propaganda [to the Arroyo administration],' writes journalist and UP journalism professor Danilo Arao.¹⁴

While independent film-makers and cultural workers have initiated and supported the formation of spaces and events where their works may be accessed, such instances of censorship against works deemed to be 'immoral' or 'seditious' have usually occurred in the context of the work's dissemination to a much wider audience through the mass media—through television and radio, in particular. Such pressure on national and local media is more evident and pervasive, to the point that international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders gave the Arroyo administration a failing mark in upholding press freedom in its annual report, citing the high incidence of murders, assaults, arrests lawsuits and censorship against the Philippine press in 2006.¹⁵

In February 2007, the Philippine government approved legislation that may have even more adverse implications on censorial practices: the Anti-Terror Law or the Human Security Act (HSA), which will take effect on 14 July 2007. This bill has drawn flak and opposition from various sectors and human rights organisations, who view it as a tool to effect more political repression and surveillance against perceived opponents of the current administration. Its critics contend that the bill's ambiguous definitions of what constitutes terrorism may be used against artists, film-makers and musicians.

The Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP), an organisation of professional and semi-professional artists from different disciplines which is currently based in Metro Manila, has denounced the bill as 'anti-artist' and 'anti-arts and culture'.¹⁶ CAP said in a statement, 'The HSA defines "terrorists" and "terrorism" so vaguely that even an art or literary piece critical of the politically and economically powerful elite could be classified as "terrorism," and its creators, "terrorists"'.

The cultural implications of the HSA are even more adverse, CAP contends. 'For the above and its other equally ambiguous provisions, it is accurate to brand [it] as the ultimate censorship instrument. Already indirectly censored by patrons' or commercial interests and the clout of the conservative church hierarchy, this bill will all the more discourage artists to explore alternative ideas and liberating themes. For the people, this bill simply means subjugation, the most dreadful state of humanity,' it continued.

CAP views the HSA as an extension of the repression brought about by the global war against terror. 'People across the world have long disdained the [HSA's] mother template, the USA PATRIOT Act. It is this legislation—and the severe human rights violations it has spawned, like the abuses in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib—that has unmasked the true face of the Bush regime's so-called "War on Terrorism" following 9/11. The USA PATRIOT Act of which the HSA is a mere copycat is in fact a key reason why there is a ever-widening call worldwide to repudiate the Bush's bogus "War on Terrorism",' CAP Secretary General Soc Jose writes. ¹⁷

Culturing Self-censorship

Another aspect which has yet to be explored in depth is the degree of self-censorship arising from the material and socio-economic conditions faced by Philippine cultural workers.

Despite the rosy economic indicators that state technocrats point to as a proof of national growth, there remain compelling signs that the majority of the Filipino people remain in dire economic straits. A national survey institute, the Social Weather Stations, has reported that one out of five Filipinos goes hungry, while the government has drastically revised the definition of 'unemployment' to keep the unemployment statistics from soaring. Faced with such prospects, many cultural workers and communities have to contend primarily with commercialising their works or sticking to tried-and-tested formulas in order to survive. For young artists in the music industry, for instance, works must not be too politically or socially critical as they risk losing producers and sponsors, says Julie Po of CAP.

In an interview, Po asserts that state policies are also steering cultural workers toward a situation where artistic freedom, license and experimentation is intentionally or unintentionally suppressed due to economic considerations. This is evident in dwindling state budgets for service sectors (e.g. health, education and culture) and institutions such as the National Museum and Cultural Center of the Philippines, Po highlights, where a situation of economic exigency and dwindling state support for the cultural sector eventually transfers to private interest the control of public expression.

The influence of private corporate interests in media and in other service- and culture-related industries also has implications on censorship in the arts. In October 2006, independent film-maker Jan Philippe Carpio charged television network ABC 5 with censorship when it edited out portions of Carpio's short film Bunker O: Sumirib, which tackled the effects of a 2006 oil spill off the coast of Guimaras island by a MT Solar I tanker chartered by global oil giant Petron Corporation. The accident, which discharged around two million litres of bunker fuel into the Visayan sea, is reckoned to be one of the largest oil spills in Philippine history.

A six-minute version of the film was to be aired on ABC 5, along with other works on the Guimaras oil spill by 12 other film-makers. However, the station aired a four-minute version, where sequences containing the words 'Petron' and 'MT Solar' were edited out. The film-maker notes that these excluded sequences consisted mostly of interviews and quotes from local fishermen affected by the environmental tragedy, whose voices were literally cut short by the censor's cutter.

'Specific and key portions of the film involving the residents of Guimaras expressing their honest feelings about the oil company and the shipping company, who as we all know are involved in this tragedy, were clearly edited out, omitted [and] censored,' the film-maker asserted.¹⁸ The network later apologised to Carpio for the incident.¹⁹

Hence, the current economic and political situation—marked by the imposition and enforcement of policies which contradict many basic constitutional rights, the climate of impunity surrounding rights violations, the facade of democratic governance which the current administration has to maintain, and the economic exigencies involved in the production, distribution, and reception of cultural goods—produces a situation which can be internally immobilising in many aspects for artists. Cultural workers are faced with a situation where 'freedom' is bestowed for as long as one does not rock the boat too hard. The views of the status quo determine the exhibition of works, imposing a form of censorship that 'forcefully thwarts dissenting views'.²⁰ As Philippine National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbrera said in an interview, 'Under the present quasi-martial law condition, the parameters are not clear. In such a situation, the artist has theoretically the freedom to express himself but the parameters are not certain and therefore, it makes an artist apprehensive on how far he can go.'²¹

Interrogating the censors

The local struggle against such systematic erasures, however, continues through the formation of tactical alliances among cultural workers. More artists are uniting among their ranks to deliver their protests against censorship and political repression. Veteran artists who survived martial law (imposed in 1972) are relearning tactics of combat, while a new generation of cultural workers—many of whom were barely conceived when martial law was first imposed—are discovering how it is to interrogate the censors of a new regime.

A case in point is the initiation of project-based interventions, such as TutoK Karapatan art project (tutok, roughly translated, means 'to focus' or 'to aim', while karapatan means 'rights'), which has been generally supported by the artistic community. TutoK convenor and Filipina visual artist Karen Flores describes the project as a 'comprehensive artists' response to the growing unrest of the times', noting that the project has made possible several exhibitions at various sites in 2006, including a community museum and park, public spaces such as churches and markets, a gallery, an academic art space and a national cultural institution.

Formed in late 2005, as a response to what the participants described as the 'deteriorating' human rights situation in the country, TutoK eventually mustered the support of around 300 Filipino artists, Its opening salvo was a multimedia public arts festival organised by the Neo-Angono Artists Collective entitled Publikhaan: Making Human Rights Issues Public, held in Angono, Rizal in November 2006. This was followed by a travelling exhibition entitled Perspektiba (Perspective) through three universities: the University of Santo Tomas, University of the Philippines and St Scholastica's College. The works in Perspektiba reflect on the overtures of state violence: literal and metaphorical dislocations, disappearances and demises associated with the rising wave of political repression in the Philippines and more importantly, which attest to the growing discontent and clamour among the visual arts community against the assaults on human rights under the Arroyo administration.²² The intentional staging of the exhibitions in university art spaces is 'timely, considering the growing number of student activists who are either abducted or killed' and it 'further underscores the initiative's aim to bring these issues to a wider audience.'²³ Such exhibitions aim to infuse the urgency of rejecting the 'passive acceptance of repression'²⁴ and demonstrate the 'resistance [to repression] must be no less ubiquitous.'²⁵

A second TutoK-initiated exhibition at the Boston Gallery in Cubao, Quezon City, entitled Dos por Dos ('Two by Two'), featured over 200 mixed media works representing each artist's reflection on human rights issues and unified by a common format: a standard size of two feet by two feet. The images, which one critic described as 'mind-boggling in variety and impact', ranged from the 'winking (a mugshot portrait of President Joseph Estrada) to the jaw-dropping (President Macapagal-Arroyo fully gowned, surrounded by piles of skulls in what is apparently a killing field of political victims, and smiling to two skulls she holds up, like Hamlet soliloquising to poor Yorick)'.²⁶

Visual artist and writer Karen Ocampo Flores, also TutoK Karapatan's project director, writes of how 'numbers [in Dos Por Dos] play a vital function in both [the exhibit's] text and subtext', recalling how it literally denotes a 'piece of wood of such thickness and breadth, wieldy enough as a weapon or a deterrent in pinch'. 'The numerous artists who make up [the exhibit] wrest the violence implicit in that numeric phrase and turn numbers into a declaration of solidarity,' she declares.²⁷ TutoK's last major site-specific exhibition Re-View: Pasang Masid was held in February 2007, at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

More artists, musicians, film-makers and writers are also forming issue-based alliances among themselves, as seen in the examples of Artists for the Removal of Gloria Arroyo (ARREST Gloria), a broad alliance of artists calling for the ouster of Arroyo and the institutionalisation of reforms beyond a constitutional succession. The campaigns for the release of political prisoners such as the 'Tagaytay Five' continue, while Axel Pinpin manages to produce and publish poetry even under detention. Progressive artists organisations are also strengthening their ties with people at the grassroots level. CAP, for instance, organises fora, skills training workshops, and outreach programmes among disenfranchised and dispossessed urban and rural poor communities as a way of 'empowering the people to speak and create for themselves'.

In the Philippines, the struggle against censorship is a struggle against forgetting and collective amnesia. The coming years will prove to be the litmus test for a new generation of cultural workers besieged by such systematic erasures. LCI.

Software Freedom Day in the Eyes of a Non-Geek

Last weekend, no thanks to my husband's insistence, I tagged along the Philippine leg for Software Freedom Day in the ASTI Building of the University of the Philippines Diliman. The event was co-organized by the Computer Professionals Union (CPU) et al.

I was apprehensive as we approached the ASTI building. Baka naman hindi ako maka-relate pag nandoon na? I'm not a computer geek, much less a techie! I still think of computers as
extended typewriters. I covet gadgets mostly on the basis of sheer visual appeal. Installing even the simplest of devices or programs scares the bejeezus out of me. My idea of troubleshooting an errant computer involves a lot of hard hand slaps on cold plastic surfaces and colorful invectives hurled out of frustration. And my most informed responses to intense technology-enamored conversations between my husband and his colleagues has so far consisted of monosyllabic, vague affirmations ("Uhm, yah!", "wow!", or "nice!"--all sincerely meant, nonetheless).

My fears were soon allayed upon entering the conference room filled with a hundred or so participants. The people inside looked normal and friendly and smart (duh--what an absurd statement...what else was I expecting?! Aliens?). Later on I learned that the participants came from different fields: students, teachers from IT schools, professionals, graphic artists, bloggers and website designers, government employees. There were also familiar faces among the activists, both the young and (to my delight) the young-at-heart, who were interested in learning how the concept of "free software for all" works (mabuhay kayo!).

The program started off fairly well. Simultaneous proceedings of the Software Freedom Day activities in Davao (at maraming tao ang umattend!) were projected onscreen. Kits with free Ubuntu CDs and stickers (these I liked!) were being handed out to everyone like candy. The Secretariat also hawked apple green (pun unintended) Software Freedom Day t-shirts nearby.

The event was advocating for the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the Philippines. Fortunately, I had no problem with that. I use Linux at home because that's what my husband installed, hehe. Gani once tried using different versions--the ones with, uhm, weird-sounding animal names (what's with 'feisty fawn' and 'dapper drake'?! baka naman meron nang 'courteous carabao' o 'tasty tarsier' courtesy of Pinoy programmers?!). Besides, who wouldn't be endeared to software that has an overfed, bug-eyed penguin for a logo?

Linux/Ubuntu, therefore, didn't come across as a totally alien experience. If I wake up early, Kalikasan's press releases are composed on OpenOffice and sent through Firefox. The graphics on this blog were produced using GIMP (which I think seems easier to navigate around than Photoshop--I'm still trying to learn how to use both). I don't know if this is my perception only, but there seems to be less viruses with FOSS. At the office computers, where everyone has yet to be weaned away from Microsoft, there are all sorts of viruses popping out at regular intervals--yuck! Besides, Linux also started some really nice games such as the Battle of Westnoth and Frozen Bubble, heheh.

During the program, I learned other larger advantages about using FOSS. Since it's free, it has the potential to be used and made available to a larger number of peoples who need computers yet who can not afford the costs of what they call "proprietary software". This includes farmers in the countryside and elementary students from rural schools. FOSS can also be of use to smaller cause-oriented organizations (such as environmental advocate groups) and networks because the precious little money spent on buying proprietary (or even pirated) software can be used elsewhere.

One of the most common complaints against using computer technology is that it is "mahal", expensive and therefore inaccessible. Using free software can work in the way of vastly reducing costs. Of course, this doesn't mean that we should forgo the larger struggle for genuine land reform and national industrialization and social change, because all of these will create conditions for more people to democratize and develop their access to technology later on.

I also learned that it will take political will to shift to FOSS on a larger scale. While some unsavory Philippine government officials under the Arroyo administration are entering into controversial internet broadband deals that will prove more atrociously burdensome to the people, other countries such as Venezuela under Hugo Chavez are making FOSS mandatory among government offices, if only to cut down on costs that could be better diverted to social services. Unfortunately, I missed the talk of Venezuelan diplomatic official Manuel Iturbe on his country's experience in using FOSS in trying to democratize access to technology. Bayan Muna Rep. Teddy Casino also gave an update on a FOSS bill that his office filed in Congress--sayang, that too I missed due to another appointment nearby.

The afternoon workshops on FOSS for daily use were generally interesting and practical. A talk by Michael Cole showed us how FOSS could be used to download and process all the nice little things on the net--music, photos, and videos. The last workshop taught us how to start a website using the drupal program. This I personally found very motivating since (1) Kalikasan PNE's website was created using drupal and (2) Noel, the guy giving the lecture, actually started learning the program only a few months back (and now he does websites). Too bad time was enough only for a short demonstration. (As for KPNE's site, we're still in the process of completing the site contents, trying to come up with a better template, and learning how to actually execute all these using the program so please bear with us...)

I also thought that the organizers should, next time, hold a separate "Linux for Dummies and Microsoft Babies" introductory workshop for those who are experiencing Linux and its applications for the very first time. For people who couldn't care less (or don't have the time to find out) about what source codes and all those other techie terms are but are nonetheless need computers to produce their reports and websites and graphics and blog entries. Pang-levelling off ba. While there were demonstration booths all over the place, a common lecture for clueless newbies would've been great. Hopefully, it could encourage more people who wouldn't normally give a hoot about what software they use to attend and give FOSS a chance.

I left the event with a lot less apprehension and skepticism than when I first entered the room that morning. Like proprietary software, I'm sure that FOSS has its limitations and challenges. But like other products of technology and creativity, FOSS has the potential to be utilized for the greater good.

FOSS is political precisely because it points towards the direction of change. Let's hope and work to ensure that it does.

On Erotic Art and Intermittent Blogging

OOOps. My last entry was over a month ago (bad, bad blogger!). Outside the deadlines and gawain -related schedules in the real world, I realized that most of little free post-dinner time I had last August was instead spent on watching back episodes of Eureka, Meteor Garden, and Rome (i.e. consuming hours of story lines premised on science and imperialism, capitalist conceptions of love, and old-school power plays). Sus ginoo! Anyway, I'm making up for missed posts by sending some things I've written over the past two months. For a start, here's a copy of the exhibit notes for Ars Erotica, a group exhibition of Philippine erotic art. It opened last July 24 as the inaugural show at the Sison Art Gallery in Malate and was curated by Ling Quisumbing:

Ars Erotica (Erotic Art) centers in on the aesthetics of desire, of inciting to sexual anticipation and display. Ars Erotica brings together the works of sixteen Philippine visual artists: Ambie Abano, Poklong Ananding, Lena Cobangbang, Juan Ariel Comia, R.M. de Leon, Christina Dy, Mario V. Fernandez, Julie Lluch, Riza Manalo, Fernando Modesto, Christina Quisumbing Ramilo, Popo San Pascual, Norberto Roldan, Gerardo Tan and Mm Yu.

The said artists work in a range of diverse artistic media and even more diverse representational inclinations: from painting and sculpture to photography, printmaking and installation, from the representational or figurative to the conceptual. The works in the exhibition range from terra cotta and soap sculptures, to photographs and oil on canvas, and installation pieces.

The exhibit occurs the context of what has been usually described as a predominantly-Catholic society—although not one without its contradictions as manifested in the symbolisms of folk Catholicism and secular, often commercialized, representations of commodified bodies. These particular contradictions are reflected in the soap sculpture entitled Hand Stuck by Poklong Ananding. Anading fuses bits and scraps of used body soaps collected from different households since 2001 and casts them into a form taken from a found object: an amputated hand from a traditional Sto. Nino icon, holding the world. The work's inclusion in the context of Ars Erotica recasts its parody: further severing the form from the religious function of its mold and recasting it in a commercial and sexual light.

Other works, such as the painting entitled Awakening, by Mario V. Fernandez, sources its images or influences from historical depictions of eroticism, conjuring through the covert symbolism of his images a "a dialogue of myth and folklore to entice the sexual sense".

Also present in the exhibition are installation works that dwell on the erotic through dualities, concepts that straddle traditional divides. Black and Not Blue, an installation of a decorated pole reaching up to the ceiling by Christina Dy, fuses several intertexts in its choice of objects, motifs, and colors: bondage and performance, costume and craft, utility and sensuality. The site of erotic encounter (the pole) becomes the phallic object on display, clothed in motifs of bondage and femininity.

Christina Quisumbing Ramilo presents objects constructed from everyday materials juxtaposed to create meanings different from their intended functions: a leather punching bag punctured with rubber nipples, and a collection of false eyelashes set in glass, for instance. The artist blurs the lines between masculinity and femininity, between the brutal and the delicate, between the aggressive and maternal: the object pummelled in the heat of anger is at the same time constructed as a source of nourshment, for instance.

Also explored in the exhibition is the capacity of the nude and the human body as a traditional subject and conveyor of the erotic. Juan Ariel Comia presents black-and-white nude photography on canvas in the works Handful and Flaccid, exploring smooth geographies of the naked body and visual puns. In contrast, Fernando Modesto utilizes his own body as a brush, a stamp on the picture plane by exhibiting an ink imprint of his lower half, entitled Bodyprint. Interestingly, both works utilize the veil of anonymity by cropping the head and face, stripping the nude form of recognition and therefore individuality.

Yet even the representation of the naked body with the face intact guarantees no shedding of anonymity. In RJ and Emmanuel by Popo San Pascual, paintings derived from pin-up images, the subject remains more of a symbol for eroticism than an portrait of an actual person. The works illustrate art critic John Berger's assertion why being naked is not the same as being nude, where "nakedness reveals itself" while "nudity is placed on display".

Sensuality may be conveyed through the literal representation of private parts. Gerardo Tan's installation, entitled Vulva, utilizes the mirror's properties of symmetry and reflection to construct the image denoted by its title. The dynamic quality of the work is evident in the way that the mirror is utilized to reflect representations in other surrounding works and juxtapose their images against that of the work. Menage a Trois by printmaker Ambie Abano, constructs the images of private parts through embossing their forms on white paper, meticulously filling in other details by hand.

Yet other works need not be illustrative to denote the erotic. Norberto Roldan's The Absolute Power of the Dragon Ruler, utilizes the symbolism of geometries and found objects to allude to power relations between the sexes. Mohair Berets, by Riza Manalo, constructs implements alluding to sexual play from found objects.

Also included are works rendered in traditional artistic media. In Thirst by Julie Lluch, the terra cotta bust of a woman looking towards the heavens becomes an unwitting phallic symbol when viewed frontally, her sinuous neck taking on the proportions and contour of the phallus.

In this historical juncture where images and texts may be mechnically produced and disseminated at will to publics, artists have utilized representations created through technology to critique the erotic, as conveyed through mass reproduction.

Declaring that Sexiness is Relative and Erotic Art is actually funny, the installation entitled Rude Nudes by Lena Cobangbang utilizes digital images on print-outs and texts on easily-reproducible bumper stickers to poke irony at the pornographic and the explicit. Mm Yu chronicles through a collage compilation, nondescriptly entitled Picture Book, various samples of sexually-explicit texts and images found in popular culture (B-movie billboards, graffiti, and magazine cut-outs, for instance), and finds humor in their juxtaposition. The scale of the collage compilation (scrapbook-size) also recasts the visual documentation of of seeing explicit sexual overtures in everyday locations into a curious collection of odds and ends. Analyze by R.M. de Leon, meanwhile downloads, utilizes and installs images taken from internet porn sites as a means of defining what is it to "break away from taboos, conventions, stereotypes and ironies".

A tragic little story and a lesson

I feel so sad. Our newly-adopted kitten, Neko, has been missing since this morning. Gani woke up to find Neko gone and the door of our laundry area ominously open. Apparently, we forgot to lock it after arriving home from an exhausting day at the SONA rally. While we were sound asleep, Neko must have ventured outside and slipped while navigating the window. The steep drop below runs up to several storeys, perhaps low enough for a kitten to survive the fall. Or perhaps not.

We tried searching for Neko downstairs, but didn't find anything, not even a tiny paw print. Neko has such a tiny, croaky, pipsqueak meow that it would have been impossible to hear him even from a few meters away. He has been with us for only two days, not long enough to find his way back to our place. And there's no way to protect him from all sorts of imaginable predators: rats, stray dogs, kids, rain, and wheels.

I remember Neko's last night with us: he was snuggling up on the sofa and nuzzling his head on our chins. He kept clambering up onto my lap while I was typing, a pesky, papansin ginger tabby kitty who would tirelessly scamper after our feet whenever we walked across the room, thinking that they were toys.

Now I just want to mope around, sob my heart out, and wallow in bitter misery until the weekend sets in. But putting things into perspective can be sobering in a mortifying sort of way: all around activists are being abducted and killed by this wretched government, and here I am, lamenting over a missing cat. As much as I'd like to shed earnest tears for our lost Neko, I realize that dissecting this event at length runs the risk of bordering on the absurd, something conceptually similar to this story posted in gmanews.tv: Dog given to Shaina as Valentine's gift is dead.

Ka Bel freed!

Finally, something happy to blog about!

This is a pathetically overdue post, something that I should have written the hour right after it happened, but didn't (fell asleep right upon reaching home). Anyway, Ka Bel, Crispin Beltran of Anakpawis, was released last July 10 after 16 months of illegal detention by the Arroyo administration.

It's about time! Ka Bel, his family and colleagues have suffered so much for the year and a half that he was detained in Camp Crame and at the Heart Center. The release is partly vindication for the wrongs done to him by the government, a crisp slap in the face at the villains behind his ordeal. And just in time for Pres. Arroyo's upcoming State of the Nation Address and the opening of the 14th Congress, where Ka Bel shall serve as a duly-elected solon for a third and final term.

I'm glad not just because Ka Bel's finally free, but also because he survived and prevailed over this unshaken, unbowed, and undefeated. He even jokes about it occasionally. And he's ready to take on more, like Manny Pacquiao minus the braggadocio and messianic illusions. From the sidelines, it felt good to clap and cheer him on, knowing that we've all gained a small step forward in the fight.

As with most happy events, we tried to document it in our own little ways. I TRIED to take some decent phone video footage of the moment when Ka Bel exited the hospital's elevators at around 9 p.m. and strode into the emergency exit where supporters cheered him on.

Just to give an idea of how happy everyone was, I'm posting it here. The shots are pretty lousy and downright amateurish, sorry. For those who don't know what to make of this chaotic scene, Ka Bel is the man in a red shirt, the one who suddenly appears out of the elevator door and hugs the other guy wearing a red shirt (KMU's Bong Labog, I think). The woman joyfully jumping up and down in the background is Ka Bel's Chief of Staff and uber-writer Ina. The rest are mostly staff, well-wishers, mass leaders. I couldn't hold my hand still because everything was literally shaking from behind the glass walls of the lobby where we were: there were just so many more people outside cheering and jumping and jostling and lining up for some real hugging and handshake space.

(As for your juvenile camerawoman, she was preparing to inch closer and take a better shot of how Ka Bel would step outside into the arms of the crowd when her cellphone suddenly rang and cut everything else out. Drats!)

July 11: It was my father's birthday. And our 30th monthsary :)

As with the past six years since Papa passed away, I found myself deliberately keeping busy on that day. I remember planning to write a blog entry the other evening but for some reason didn't. This evening I realized that, ever since putting up this blog two years ago, that I have never written at length about events deeply personal since 2005: coping with events, getting married, watching my mother-in-law pass away, starting with a new slate, being with my grandmother when she died last January. Maybe someday I'll be able to patch all these memories together into a cohesive whole.

I used to think that the power of writing encompassed everything. Language is a wonderful intervention on consciousness, a means of defining the world. Through it one is empowered to find significance in the mundane, humor in coldness and chaos, nobleness in the humble. Because of it, there are infinite ways to converse about comfort, ways to articulate elation and celebration. Even things which we often wish to turn away from can be confronted through language. Truths are woven and unravelled in the turn of a phrase. Dissent will always have its way of spelling itself out on the page. Anger is fluid: in the absence of restraint it shall surely spill and stain everything in its path. But for sadness? Sometimes there are just no words.

Painting the Disappeared

I'm posting a short write-up I did for Yasmin Sison's show The Punky Brewster Session held at mag:net gallery Katipunan from May 24 to June 11 this year (hope the artist and mag:net both don't mind) .

In the course of freelance writing for galleries, I guess there are times when some art works are personally striking (and exciting) in a significant way: not only in terms of exquisite visuals but also in their contextual significance to myself as a viewer. The works may or may not be overtly "political" in their imagery and themes, but nonetheless make good sense when understood in the context of these disturbing times. At their best, these are works that have the power to make us think of--or rethink--relations between prevailing realities. I think that was the case when I saw Sison's paintings for this show.

The effect of the works may have been unintentional. Perhaps it has to do with personally having friends who were victims of human rights violations, but the first thing that I thought of when I opened the file images of her works were all the photographs of people who were abducted under the Arroyo administration, images of people who have been literally cut off from being seen and held by their families, friends, and colleagues, cut out from the rest of society by unknown abductors.

I remember the photographs of the desaparecidos: some are from IDs but others are snapshots of the victims during happier days. Sans the texts and slogans, Karen Empeno looks like just another young girl, no different from you and me, grinning in what looks like a cropped shot of a crowded rally or a field trip on a sunny day.

Now, whenever I look at Sison's works, where images of people are cut out from their immediate surroundings, a chill runs through my spine. I think of what Karen and Sherlyn's abductors have done, and are trying to do with many others--eliminate the person from existing so that nothing, not even the memory of them, remains. And this is why abductions are said to be the most cruel forms of human rights violations that can ever be committed against a person: without the certainty of closure, in whatever form it may take, their abductors and the masterminds behind it shall forever leave a gaping hole in the lives of the people their victims leave behind, like a jigsaw puzzle with the last piece missing.

Their abductors from the military may think that this is all a whimsical game, a project that needs to be implemented in the course of "knowing the enemy". But for those whose lives have included and intersected with that of the victims, the loss painfully alters and shatters repeatedly, in the absence of knowing.

I think the most of the works in the show have the power to quietly articulate that sense and process of displacement. I wanted to do a longer and separate article on this but ran out of time before the show ended: May and June being such crazy, busy months with the national elections and mining campaigns and other equally important mid-year deadlines. Oh well. Anyway, here's the partial text of the write-up:

Memory, presence and the various excisions of these are explored in The Punky Brewster Session, Yasmin Sison's latest one-woman exhibition at mag:net. Sison exhibits paintings in oil on canvas, ranging in size from 6 x 4 ft. and 3 x 4 ft., which the artist considers as a "continuation of previous works that deal with memory, collective memory and the mutability of memories and thus its inherent possibilities".

In her previous show entitled Unmade (this time at mag:net Paseo), Sison "covers up supposed personages" whose photographs fill the pages of found fashion magazines, rendering them anonymous, cut out and erased from the pretty picture plane. Barely a year later, her follow-up exhibition ventures beyond the confines of pictorial shoots and comfortable interiors. It features works that focus on the people either engaged in acts or located at the peripheries of sites which can be initially associated with amusement and fun: the carnival grounds, an unmade bed ready for a sleep-over session, a classroom in a state of disarray.

But more than to merely effect a change of scenery, the works dare disturb. Though the artist professes that the series is perhaps "more about…images that have a [sense of] play"—her take on the formal aspects of the work emphasizes the process of creating negative images from cut outs "that tend to look like a grade school project"—one can not help but sense the incidental social irony denoted by the show. For Sison's paintings—which deal with excisions of bodies and presences—are being exhibited at a political and social period rife with intermittent reports of human rights violations: mutilations, erasures of words and lives, literal disappearances and rub-outs. At a time when the body count of desaparecidos (a Spanish term referring to South American victims of state terrorism and later assimilated into the Philippines during Martial Law) has reached over 200 since Arroyo took over the Palace seat back in 2001, the paintings indirectly recall the memory—no matter how suppressed—of how people are being mutilated, made to disappear, and similarly excised inside classrooms, homes and malls.

Whether Sison intentionally alludes to this or not, the 1980s American sitcom Punky Brewster (from which the exhibition derives its title) ironically revolves around the life of a little girl whose parents have disappeared and abandoned her while still an infant. Sison may have initially chosen the title based on the effects of colors and textures utilized in her works (defining these as more of a "pop song more than an opera" if made into a song), but this whimsical and innocent juxtaposition of the works in the context of the ongoing human rights crisis make the irony of all this seem grimmer. What is being exhibited, thus, is not only a conceptual representation of a grade school project, but documentary evidences of Mutilation: a defacement of form, recollection, and presence. More than being formal exercises in visual perception, the works are indirect reminders that life outside the gallery, unlike in TV sitcoms, does not always end up with happy, picture-perfect endings.
----
From a recent press conference:

I repeat, I accuse the Army
of the crime of kidnapping my son Jonas
on April 28, 2007
at the Ever Gotesco Mall in Quezon City.
I strongly suspect that either or both
of the former commanding officers of the 56th IB,
Lt. Col. Clement and Lt. Col. Feliciano
are participants in that crime.
And the Chief of Staff
of the Armed Forces of the Philippines,
Gen. Hermogenes Esperon,
is covering up the crime
committed against Jonas.

--- Dr. Edita T. Burgos,
mother of abducted agriculturist and activist Jonas Burgos