Incarcerated But Undaunted

(published in www.bulatlat.com)

Crispin Beltran, 73 years old and hypertensive, could be mistaken for an ordinary senior citizen confined at the Philippine Heart Center (PHC) for Asia in Quezon City. But having two armed Philippine National Police (PNP) personnel stationed outside his room and their companions prowling the nearby corridors shows otherwise.

Beltran, veteran labor leader turned parliamentarian, will be spending his fourth month of detention under police custody at the Room 429 of this hospital. To date, he has already spent two months at the PHC, two months at the General Hospital of Camp Crame, and one week in solitary imprisonment since his arrest by the PNP last February 25. Yet Beltran, or Ka Bel (Comrade Bel) as he is more popularly known, generally remains undaunted, knowing that these days only signify a lull before the storm.

At Camp Crame

Inside Ka Bel’s room, it is impossible not to be reminded of the political crisis. Stickers bearing the slogan Free Ka Bel Now! End political harassment! are all over the room. Decorating the bare walls is a black-and-white poster with the six party-list representatives from Bayan Muna (People First), Anakpawis (Toiling Masses) and Gabriela Women’s Party (GWP). Hung next to his bedside are two canvas ‘bibs’, with the words P125, Ipaglaban! (Fight for a P125 [legislated wage increase for workers]) and Cha-Cha, Ibasura! (Junk Charter Change!).

These are the same issues that Ka Bel has been advocating as Anakpawis party-list representative before being arrested without a warrant by the PNP on February 25, 2006, a day after President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo declared a state of national emergency through Presidential Proclamation (PP) 1017.

PP 1017 was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the Philippines. But Beltran continues to be detained under false and fabricated charges of inciting to rebellion—a charge that the Department of Justice (DOJ) also slapped against at least 51 other individuals, including Beltran's colleagues from the progressive party-list bloc in the House of Representatives.

Beltran was the only one among the six who was caught and detained at Camp Crame. Despite suffering from hypertension and a minor stroke two years ago, Ka Bel was forcibly detained in an isolated cell at Camp Crame and subjected to a sham inquest proceeding a day after.

At first, the PNP jailed Ka Bel at the Custodial Center of Camp Crame for a week, treating him like a high-profile criminal. He was confined in a solitary cell: a bare rectangular space measuring around 2 meters by 4 meters with steel bars on one end. Fully-armed police personnel guarded the hallways, and food was served tied up in little plastic bags, he said.

“Kung ano ang sitwasyon ko noong 1982 ay ganoon din ngayong 2006,” (My situation in 1982 is the same as now in 2006.) Ka Bel recalled of that period of incarceration at the Custodial Center.

Beltran was jailed and tortured as a political prisoner under Martial Law, along with the late Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU or May First Movement) Chairperson Felixberto “Ka Bert” Olalia, in Camp Crame in 1982. Ka Bel eventually escaped from prison and fled the city, while Ka Bert eventually succumbed to a heart attack while in prison. The rebellion charges filed against Beltran were eventually dropped by the Aquino administration after Pres. Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown by People Power in 1986.

A detention cell

Despite his resolve to remain strong, Ka Bel experiences recurring nightmares about being tortured again and even assassinated while in the Custodial Center.

This contributed to the further deterioration of the 73-year old solon’s health. By March 2, Ka Bel's dangerously high blood pressure levels compelled the police to transfer him to the camp's General Hospital—not much of a difference, in retrospect, as the place did not have adequate medical facilities or services.

The transfer did little to lessen his agitated state. Nonchalant and inconsistent medical services forced them to double-check his health, Beltran's nightmares about being assassinated while in police custody continued, and sudden incursions by police clad in full battle gear into his room kept him in a state of red alert and worry, he said. Reporters were also barred from visiting his room.

“This is not a hospital, this is a detention cell,” Ka Bel and his family members said.

“Sa PNP General Hospital, wala akong panahon para mag-relax. Palaging okupado ang isipan at apprehensive kami sa mga guwardiya, dahil nasa bituka kami ng kaaway,” ( I do not have time to relax while at the PNP General Hospital. My mind is always occupied and we are apprehensive of the guards. We are right inside the enemy’s territory.) Beltran said.

To keep him distracted, Ka Bel's family and staff began bringing him newspapers and documents for him to read. An old typewriter and pad paper were brought into the room, where he would compose letters to friends and colleagues and statements to media about various issues. A laptop belonging to one of his kids was also brought in, as Ka Bel wanted to learn how to use a computer.

Change of scenery

On April 24, the Makati Regional Trial Court finally granted Beltran permission to transfer to the Heart Center for humanitarian reasons, despite the objections of the PNP and the DOJ. After nearly two days of waiting, Ka Bel was finally transferred to Room 429 of the PHC.

The transfer to the Heart Center was a change of scenery for Ka Bel. There, he was finally able to undergo a battery of much-needed medical tests, monitoring and rest.

It was also there where Ka Bel spent his first Labor Day away from the traditional street demonstrations in Manila. As a former chairperson of the KMU, the largest militant labor center in the Philippines, Beltran registered a “perfect attendance” at all Labor Day rallies since People Power 1 in 1986. His frustration and sadness over this year’s absence was somewhat eased by a fellow patient's celebration of her birthday party on May 1, in the adjoining room, he recalled.

Deprived of the right to go home, Ka Bel's family and 27 grandchildren regularly attend to him at the hospital, bringing fruits and running small errands for their Lolo Di (Grandfather Di). On weekends, his grandchildren cuddle up on Ka Bel's bed to watch cartoon reruns and sports matches on TV.

During the long afternoons, Ka Bel avidly watches boxing, his favorite sport, on television. His love for the sport is such that even his family and visitors find it hard to distract him from glancing at the blow-by-blow matches every now and then.

Ka Bel's family time is occasionally interrupted as visitors from all walks of life drop by during hospital hours: legal counsels and human rights lawyers, activists, congressional staff, religious leaders, fellow solons and government officials, labor and peasant leaders, foreign visitors, writers, students, and—somewhat ironically--people seeking medical assistance.

Virtual office

Ka Bel has been kept immobile by his detention, but strives to keep his body and mind strong. Although he devotes an hour each morning for a few rounds of push-ups and stretching exercises along the hospital corridors, Ka Bel said that is still a far cry from his previous dawn “work-outs” of planting vegetables at home as a practicing farmer before going to Congress in the morning.

“Dito [sa ospital], hindi ako gaanong pinapawisan,” (Here in the hospital, I do not sweat a lot from working out.) Ka Bel said, obviously missing the small plot of soil and vegetables he has carefully tended for months.

Nowadays, Ka Bel is usually clad in the PHC's standard hospital gown and slippers. But he quickly dons a red Anakpawis cap with a small Congressional seal, whenever visitors arrive.

This hospital room has also turned into a virtual office. Ka Bel spends his extra time poring over newspapers and books, as he used to during breaks at the House of Representatives. He keeps a can full of pens and pencils beside him, to underline important passages in news stories and quotes.

Barred from attending events ordinary citizens are free to go to, Ka Bel keeps himself updated on the political and economic developments of the day by constantly monitoring the news. Stationed next to his medicines are stacks of documents and reading materials: newspapers, congressional reports, legal documents and books. A small television is kept on for most of the day, and Ka Bel's trusty old radio set is occasionally turned on in order to monitor radio reports.

Prevented from visiting his constituents, the people have taken it upon themselves to go to Ka Bel. Pickets, masses, and group visits are frequently held outside the hospital, the largest to date being a 200-strong strong contingent of peasants from Central Luzon and Southern Tagalog last week.

The hospital room is also turning to be a virtual library. A voracious reader, Ka Bel also finished reading several books while in detention. He barely finished with John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and the handbook Health for the People published by the Council for Health and Development, when he picked up Dante Simbulan's The Modern Principalia and Ibon Foundation's Empty Promises, Empty Stomachs.

Visitors also drop by to give him reading materials. The copies of The Poverty of Memory: Essays on History and Empire (by Red Constantino) and Renato Constantino: A Life Revisited (Rosalinda Pineda-Ofreneo), for instance, are gifts. Outside the room, Ka Bel's custodians are also occasionally seen reading pocketbooks to fight boredom.

Raging against complacency

Despite the lull he experiences in between court hearings, one can sense fire burning inside Ka Bel's calm exterior, especially at this time of intense human rights violations against activists.

“Gusto kong makaganti,” (I want to get even.) he said whenever he hears of more extrajudicial killings of activists, many of whom he has known personally.

At times, sadness and anger overwhelms him whenever visitors and comrades arrive to share stories. Ka Bel's voice breaks, and he temporarily excuses himself for a few minutes inside the comfort room.

Yet the veteran labor leader finds inspiration in the fact that younger mass leaders of progressive organizations continue to remain undaunted and militant despite intensifying political repression.

“They are generally dedicated. Hindi sila natatakot,” (They are not afraid.) Ka Bel said of this younger generation of leaders, perhaps seeing in them the qualities he possessed as a trade union leader decades ago.

Among other things, Ka Bel is now looking forward to critiquing President Arroyo's upcoming State of the Nation Address (SONA) as Congress resumes the remainder of its sessions this July.

“GMA will be drumming up the false gains of her labor export policy and development councils. She will be reiterating her so-called God-given qualities for the Presidency and brag about her non-existent accomplishments, which is so insensitive in the midst of so much landlessness and poverty among the people,” Ka Bel said.

The Arroyo administration may have temporarily prevented Ka Bel from fulfilling his duties as a duly-elected party-list representative of the toiling masses. But from the looks of it, this temporary spate of political repression has affirmed Crispin Beltran's resolve to prepare for a longer fight ahead. Ka Bel may have been slightly immobilized by his arrest and incarceration, but he remains unbent and unbound, remembering how periods such as these have always signified the lull before the coming storm.

Photo above by Jes Aznar

salvaged poem

Reflections on a damp evening in a distant land

You exhibit a translucency
On nights such as these:

Tonight, as smoke
Descends on stars,

When the moon
Is a sliver of nectar
On a dew-spattered plain,

Rumors of exits
Stain monsoons

And seep through mists
Obscuring mountains.

In these dim nights of
Inchoate sadness, you are
Real: wafts of sunlight
Streaked with dust-motes; livid, like the glare
Of languid afternoons. Without you, the night
Acquires a solitary luminescence
As with transience, or rage

or silence.

Unsettling, how the recall of your face

blazes like braziers

On nights such as these.

*ca. 2000. dug this up from the archives of an old moldy notebook. i rededicate this to erika salang, whose valiant story continues to humble us and remind us of the whys and hows.

A Multitude of Muses

Whom the Muses endow, they endow bountifully. In this year's Walong Filipina exhibition last March, the Liongoren Gallery features women artists who have been precisely, bountifully endowed with a multitude of talents spanning the range of arts, and who have chosen to carve their own paths apart from that delineated by the traditional and the predictable.

This year's Walong Filipina exhibition pays homage to a wide range of arts and cultural disciplines. It, for instance, is notable in the sense that it has given space to photography, installation, and graphic art by Filipina cultural workers, as well as focus on women artists who have chosen to depict national minorities and their respective cultures as their subjects. The show has also provided space to women cultural workers who, while already recognized in other fields of the arts, continue to practice their vocations alongside their personal art-production.

Traditional genre such as portraits and landscapes also populate the Walong Filipina show, although not wholly in the predictable sense of the word. The woman artists in this show who utilize traditional artistic media and techniques nonetheless produce fresh images through their choice and depiction of their respective subject matter.

In her Taal Series, for instance, nurse and gallery owner Rollie Yusi utilizes her mastery of watercolour techniques to depict delicate vistas of the popular tourist destination. Taal On A Clear Day, for instance, is modelled through overlapping washes that delineate sky from sea; nuances of pigment evoke the whiff of breeze wafting through coconut leaves, the calm lapping of wind upon lake, islands unfolding through the haze. Works lightly tinged with rose and purple evoke the transition between dawn, dusk, or the calm before a storm. Yusi's enchanting 'lakescapes', so to speak, defamiliarize and make distant a site that has continually been occupying the State's glossy and tourism-oriented ad spiels.

Multi-awarded singer-songwriter Cynthia Alexander alludes to personal narratives in her paintings through the poetic continuity of images. Coming Back, presumably a self-portrait of the artist, discreetly depicts in the background the figure of a woman with an umbrella, back turned to the viewer. In another painting entitled Takipsilim , this same woman is intriguingly depicted as a central image, walking away into a distant and moonlit landscape. Alexander's use of blue and yellow pigments to exclusively delineate light from shadow in the works also convey a tone of mystery in the stories hidden beneath the literal images of the works.

This year's Walong Filipina also features Filipina women artists from the South, and their continuing desire to popularize and document images of traditional ethnic culture. Ligaya Amilbangsa, while foremost known as a groundbreaking scholar and practitioner of the pangalay (a traditional popular festival dance of the Sulu archipelago), displays in this show her lifelong love for the dance . Such a cultural advocacy is overtly reflected in her paintings, such as the self-portrait entitled Pangalay Rising (oil on canvas, 2004). In this work, the artist depicts self throughout the stages of performing the sinuous rhythmic movements of the dance, donning the janggay (extended metal finger nail) while positioned beside a gabbang (Tausug bamboo xylophone, decorated with exquisite wood carvings).

Amilbangsa's lifelong efforts to depict and document the living cultural traditions of the Tausug tribes in Southern Philippines are likewise seen in works such as Seaside (2004), a quaint portrait of a pottery vendor cradling her baby in their hut spanning the sea. This work on pastel depicts a traditional and nearly-universal theme in art history (mother and child) in the context of local Tausug society.

The resolve to depict woman from national minorities throughout the Philippines and the living indigenous traditions is likewise invigorated in the works of art teacher and gallery owner Lea Padilla and documentary photographer and researcher Ma. Cristina Saulo.

If Amilbangsa's channels her advocacies through scholarly studies and active pedagogical efforts, Padilla's practice as a Mindanao-based cultural practitioner is channelled through her proprietorship of the Linya Gallery in Iligan City and her personal works.

Padilla similarly locates near-universal scenes in the local context, producing images that depict familiar human routines and motions (the act of genuflecting before a meal, or creating communal music, for instance) amidst the initially unfamiliar array of local ornamental motifs. Padilla's works point to a vibrant and intense familiarity with the patterns of the local. In her Pagana Maranao Series (acrylic on canvas, 2006), the artist juxtaposes solid and strung hues and flat backgrounds with intricate and painstakingly-rendered details of Southern Philippine decorative motifs, seen in the ukkil embellishments all throughout the textiles, accessories, tableware, and musical instruments that populate the spaces of her works.

Also present in this year's Walong Filipina show are notable Filipina photographers and their works. Ma. Cristina Saulo depicts the woman of the Philippines' national minorities through a different approach: the straightforward gaze of the mechanically-captured image. Saulo is one of the few Filipina cultural workers who have braved forays into documentary photography and local research into the selected national minorities of the Philippines and the South East Asian region, a rarity of sorts nowadays.

Saulo's photographs of the Filipino Amerasians in the Central Luzon region and the Batak tribe of Palawan in the Southern Tagalog region, and the Mlabri ang Hmong tribes in Thailand are intimate portraits of a people pushed to the margins by colonial incursions. Despite the appalling degree of material and social disenfranchisement that Philippine national minorities are subjected to, Saulo manages to capture portraits of a people that do not evoke pity, but quiet dignity. There is an elegant ease, even a poignant beauty, in the way Saulo's images capture the stark bareness of her subject's lives, such as in the work Batak Girl (Sepia toned silver gelatine print, 2000) or Fisherfolks' Daughter (Selenium toned silver gelatine print, 2003). Other works such as Tagbanua Woman (sepia toned silver gelatine print, 2002) evoke the graceful weight of passing time.

On the other hand, photographer and Silver Lens Creative Director Isa Lorenzo chooses to capture images of still objects and scapes, using their formal qualities to transform familiar household scenes into unknown territories. February (lambda duratrans on lightbox) captures a fog-shrouded landscape from an unknown location, presumably taken at that time of the year. Lorenzo also infuses poetic allusions through the texts of her works' titles, seen in the photograph of a silver ball suspended on a ceiling entitled Kissing, Eyes Closed, or that of what seems to be a clear plastic cap suspended on a wall entitled In Sickness and In Health. The deliberate disjunction between the text and the image projected points to the need to see beyond the literal beauty of the image and uncover an entire narrative of contexts beneath.

Interestingly, Lorenzo's works are positioned in the most inconspicuous corners of the gallery, in places where one least expects to find a 'work of art'. This deliberate curatorial choice also conveys the message that art, whether it be through painting or photography, persists even in the margins of one's world. Lorenzo also makes effective use of the lightbox as a component of her photography display, using the medium to illuminate her images.

Other artistic genres represented in Walong Filipina include installation and functional art in the works of Isabel Aquilizan and Hannah Liongoren.

Aquilizan, an installation artist and theatre director who has usually worked in tandem with artist-husband Alfredo Aquilizan on various inter-disciplinary, collaborative and communal art projects, presents her individual works this time around. Aquilizan makes use of used blankets, seemingly mundane items that nevertheless comprise the various important rituals and phases of our lives, from womb to tomb, from the sacral to the carnal.

As an object signifying social relations and structures, these threadbare and patchwork-riddled blankets convey the spartan yet strong lives that millions of Filipinas live as a consequence of prevailing social realities. The blankets symbolize a tapestry of lives, worn and weary through the years, yet still held together through common threads and painstaking initiatives to heal and repair whatever rips or tears there are. ' Alagang Perla', for instance, may symbolically attest to how impoverished women nationwide are striving to care for their kin and children even with the barest essentials, such as the cheap pink detergent sold in bars all over the country. This is a reminder that gently settles upon the viewer just as the floral fragrance emanating from the installation wafts subtly throughout the gallery space.

Contemporary graphic art and functional pieces, meanwhile, converge in Hannah Liongoren's series of handmade notebook covers on canvas. Liongoren hails from an emerging generation of Filipina graphic artists and illustrators from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. Her works combine contemporary graphic technology, popular culture, and biographical vignettes, seen in the elements of works such as Lola Ada, Cut, and Fhaggi.

All in all, the multitude of Muses paid homage to in this year's Walong Filipina spans an entire range of art disciplines, subjects, and inclinations. As such, the deities of the arts, wherever they may be, must indeed be pleased. ###

adik!

- Your Personality Is Like Acid

A bit wacky, you're very difficult to predict. One moment you're in your own little happy universe... And the next, you're on a bad trip to your own personal hell!

What Drug Is Your Personality Like?

Gut Rumblings

The word banquet normally connotes images of gustatory indulgence and material sumptuousness: a lavish selection of edibles surrounded by satiated gaiety, inebriated celebration, and merry-making all around.

But Banquet, Mideo Cruz's third one-man show at the Cultural Center of the Philippines from February 2 to , takes a divergent tack in representing this concept the artist appropriates as a title. Rather than mimetically depicting the common notion of a banquet as a feast of plenty, Cruz chooses to unmask the poles of gluttony and deprivation existing in today's Third World societies. The banquet represents a spartan and parasitic repast, rather than a source of communal nourishment and gaiety.

Interestingly this time, Cruz eschews figurative pictorial representation and instead resorts to irony and tongue-in-cheek critique through abstraction, installation, and performance art. This is among Cruz's first few exhibitions of his abstract works on paper, as the artist is known for his figurative and installation-based works in his previous solo shows Pilipinas Kong Mahal (My Beloved Country, 1998) at the Tumbang Preso Cafe in Quezon City and Santong Pinagpasasaan (Sacred Abused, 2005) at the Kulay Diwa Galleries in Paranaque.

Meanwhile, Cruz's engagements in performance art is also a direct influence of Cruz's previous involvements in political and collaborative artistic engagement as a former affiliate of the protest art collective UGAT-Lahi and one of the main movers in the multi-media international artist network New World Disorder since 2002.

In this exhibition, Cruz positions his coordinates within the general context of Third World marginalization and chronic disenfranchisement, noting the appalling level of disparities in Philippine contemporary society, between the entrenched few seated at the banquet tables, so to speak, and the vast majority who subsist on pagpag (local slang for discarded and recycled foodstuffs) in the streets just outside the Palace halls.

In Banquet, performance art and painting are juxtaposed to deliver Cruz's visual indictments against these societal contradictions. On the opening night of Banquet last February 2, the artist delivered a prolonged “live installation” piece in the center of the gallery space, critiquing contemporary practices of power-related and material excesses and overindulgences. Cruz settles in front of a table laden with white linen and bones, garbed in finery, and donning a mask of a pig. This solitary guest helps himself to the macabre banquet of bones and flesh, gorging on the entire pile throughout the opening of the show. Luxury is denoted through symbols such as the candelabra positioned nearby, while a carved white image of The Last Supper hung above the spectacle seems to denote that nothing is left ever left sacred or untouchable by such greed.

The performance itself is sufficient in driving home the scathing point of Cruz's ironic wit: that 'beasts' such as these are all too real and pervasive once the viewer steps out of the gallery's pristine halls, populating the nation's chambers of power. Cruz flings this image of rapacious personal greed in the face of facts such as the Philippines being mired into trillions worth of foreign debt and registering record-breaking levels of hunger and unemployment at the start of 2006.

The symbolic jab at persistent issues such as imperialism and bureaucrat capitalism as a fundamental element in the signified consumption of our resources and lifeblood-whether material, symbolic, or ideological-is also evident from the start. The sustained time sequence of the entire performance (approximately two hours) also signifies the persistence and prolonged recurrence of such forms of dominance in today's society.

Meanwhile, in the two-dimensional works shown in Banquet, critique is defined through the negation of the visual. Banquet presents more than a hundred small abstract works rendered in acrylic and mixed media on paper, tiled all around the Small Gallery's walls. The presence of the artist's social commentary is defined through the general obscuring or erasure of images—the 'whitewash' of the abundance that was formerly perceived.

Entitled by Cruz as his Prism Deduction series, the works are varying configurations of nuanced grey and white geometric forms, gestural monochromatic strokes, and plays on optical perception and space. Food posters primed with white latex paint and painted over with loose, sweeping strokes of white are exhibited alongside delicately-nuanced monochromatic and geometric abstract works rendered in charcoal and graphite on acrylic. The works are all tiled, side by side, across the left and right sides of the gallery walls, surrounding the now-desolate table filled with food discards.

In contrast to the overt satirical tone employed by Cruz's live performance, the political import of the paintings seems obscured by non-figurative modes of seeing. As a concept, the term prism deduction seems rather slippery in terms of adherence to scientific processes, but this is perhaps a formal articulation of the bleakness of social reality, rather than an experimental accounting for the exact behavior of optics.

The implicit critique may be gleaned from the type of abstraction and processes that Cruz resorts to in his two-dimensional works. The reference to social reality seems rather tangential in the works hung on the walls, but may be inferred in their production processes. The way Cruz builds up the translucency of his geometric images--obscuring of form and previously defined boundaries: an erasure of what is present—may also be a visual articulation and critique of the calculated detachment and nebulous apathy the artist perceives in today's milieu. No scarlet scars of rage jar the works' carefully rendered and miasmic layers: instead, the borders of forms rendered on graphite are clothed in haze. This visual metaphor may denote the illusive blurring of boundaries used to justify various forms of intervention that precede such spates of greed and hunger.

Examining Cruz's use of process also makes the veiled criticism evident. For instance, Cruz's painting over discarded cardboard posters depicting images of abundant food with white pigments adds to the strength of his critique. The artist complements the previous performance depicting rapacity by juxtaposing the installation with paintings where previously discernible images of nourishment and survival are erased or whitewashed. This harks back to the reality that majority of the people in this nation (with 80% of the population surviving on P90 or less per day as of 2003, way before the Expanded Value Added Tax) are deprived of seeing supposed economic gains and are prevented from turning their consumption into a tangible act. Images of food are painted over, and the color white takes on a sinister symbolism: white of hunger and bones, white of emptiness and death.

The abstraction does not lessen the societal import of the pieces, but rather, complements the messages that the artist wishes to convey. This series, full of seemingly uniform yet shifting signs, are Cruz’s attempt to visually articulate the artist’s personal and political sentiments on the experience of material disenfranchisement and social dislocation. In the final accounting, Banquet leaves the viewer sated yet disturbed at the growing rumblings in the gut.

Images from the Margins

Images from the Margins:
the Mangyan struggle against dispossession
in the documentary-photography of Raymond Panaligan


Raymond Panaligan's images are postcards from the peripheries of the Philippines: intimate snapshots of daily scenes from Mangyan communities in southern Mindoro. Panaligan presents portraits of a people dispossessed by colonial and contemporary incursions into their ancestral lands, disenfranchised in their own communal territories, and left behind in an archipelago surrounded by crisis.

The Mangyan documentation is an ongoing project of his. Using photography as a means to document their presence, Panal igan has chronicled the day to day lives of Mangyans through the years since 1993, during his excursions to their communities in southern Mindoro. He has documented most closely the lines of Hanunoo Mangyans, one of the seven existing tribes populating the peripheries of Mansalay and Bulalacao at the southeastern fringes of Mindoro Island. Panaligan has journeyed back and forth from Manila to Mindoro since then, capturing their images through community and individual immersions, fact-finding operat ions and peace missions.

Panaligan's documentation is relevant because of its historical value and from its political import. While documentary evidence related to the Mangyan tribes can be accessed through archives and libraries, existing visual evidence of Mangyan communities is sparse and rare. Panaligan engages in a cultural practice that charts and recreates their existence in collective and public memory, a kind of assurance against transience and forgetting.

The conscious political import of Panaligan's choice to present images from the margins is evident: as a recipient of the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship for Photography in 1999, Panaligan could h ave chosen to continue producing photographs of New York's grim realities. Or shots from his stints as a Manila-based freelance photojournalist. Yet the Mangyan photo-documentation project has remained a sustained and continuous endeavor for more than a decade, something that Panaligan committed himself to on a long-term basis.

The difference of Panaligan's images from that of existing documentation of different Mangyan tribes lies in their affinities with their subjects. Unlike colonial-age ethnographic studies and shots for foreign tourist consumption, the images are not voyeuristic tokens of the 'savage natives': taken as samples of the exotic and uncivilized under the lying assumption of cultural and material inferiority.

Instead, Panaligan's photographs are intimate and straightforward depictions of the Mangyans from their point of view. This can be inferred from the way the images are taken by the photographer: instead of staged frontal or profile poses of the Mangyans intended to document their details of clothing or physique, Panaligan unobtrusively captures spontaneous scenes and details from their day to day lives, setting his lens whenever and wherever his subjects feel comfortable in. The subjects behave naturally even as the lens captures their images, perhaps indicating a degree of familiarity or ease with the photographer's presence. This is a significant clue that points to the photographer's affinity for the Mangyan way of life and struggle, considering the persistence of pre-modern superstitions that believe cameras 'capture' a part of a person's soul and the grim paranoia over military surveillance through technological equipment, such as cameras and videos.

The photographs attest to how the Hanunoo Mangyans have adhered to their traditions, kept alive in the handicrafts and personal ornaments they produce by hand. Panaligan's images of Mangyan mothers and their children document the various communal crafts, such as basketry, which they engage in during their spare time between kaingin farming,child-rearing, and other chores. The photograph of a smiling Mangyan baby, for instance, is laden with the beaded bracelets, basketry,and textiles that Mangyan women have also started to produce as for commercial, as well as personal, consumption over the years.

Yet, the images also document surface manifestations of how Mangyans have been systematically isolated from the mainland economy, politics, and culture. A photograph of three tribes people wandering through a commercial area with a few handwoven wares remind the viewer of their struggle to survive in an economy and society that refuses to integrate their specific needs into the whole. This dislocation and juxtaposition of differing cultural and material differences is seen in a photograph of a young Mangyan girl at a hand loom, weaving their traditional blue and white textile while wearing a t-shirt with the acronym 'USA' (donated as a relief good or bought with precious cash, perhaps).

Images of Mangyan children populate Panaligan's works, perhaps as a metaphor for the emergence of a new generation of dispossessed national minorities who grow up in the ways of their ancestors but who are also systematically deprived of their basic rights and needs up to the present.

The image of a lone Mangyan child, crunched up in hunger before three empty calderos, sums up the stark reminders of the contrasting reality in Philippine society: in spite of all the state's proclamations of economic development and 'progress', fundamental economic and social problems continue to ravage national minorities such as the Mangyan tribes. The photographs, simple depictions of deprivation they may seem to be on the surface, attest to the painful persistence of problems that are so basic: hunger, landlessness, terror wrought by militarization and counter-insurgency campaigns, displacement by foreign multinational incursions into potential mining sites, lack of access to basic social services such as health care and education.

The photographs document the serenity and composure with which the Mangyans face their trials, but much more lies beneath the black and white images. These silently harbor the Mangyans testimonies of their perennial
problems with the lack of irrigation, and damaging floods when the river overflows during the rainy season. The images of Mangyan families eating together hide the reality that people in this part of the archipelago are forced to eat only once or twice a day. They subsist mainly on bananas and eat rice only once or twice a week. While their harvest of mangoes and bananas is abundant, the literal fruits of their labor remain underpriced. One sack containing around 300 mangoes can be easily haggled local traders for only thirty to forty pesos, for instance.

The images of Mangyan children foraging in foliage underscore the fact that they are not in school. The rare and far-flung schoolhouses in Mindoro's interior areas (where most Mangyans live) stop at the grade school level due to the chronic lack of teachers. Even then many children are forced to stop their studies because they have to find food or work for their families. Even medical and relief missions are rare, as compared to the seemingly non-existent government health facilities scattered in a few towns. Tuberculosis, long eradicated in developed countries, still remains a scourge in these parts. There is little electricity and potable water sources to speak of.

What the images do not depict are more sinister. These are rarely documented through photographs, but human rights violations by the military are common occurrences, especially even since Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan was assigned to head the counter-insurgency campaign in the Southern Tagalog region, with special and bloodthirsty focus on Mindoro. Undocumented by photographs are the murders and tortures of Mangyans suspected to be New Peoples' Army (NPA) members or supporters. Soldiers actively recruited for CAFGUs among Mangyans, promising a few thousand pesos per month and a free coffin in return for their roles in the counter-insurgency campaigns.

Yet, at the same time, the photographs stand as a testament to their struggle against neocolonial and military exploitation and adherence to the values of their ancestors. Their traditional and communal values of cooperation and togetherness are seen in the photographs of Mangyan families having their humble meals together in their cramped and handmade huts. At a time when many other Filipino families are forced and encouraged by the state's labor export policies to live apart in order to survive and stay together, these images remind us that the Mangyans, among the most systematically deprived in this nation of the exploited, have no little choice but to find strength in unity and struggle.

In the end, it is the photograph of a Mangyan child wielding a bolo and struggling to get through through the thick foliage that provides the compelling metaphor for a peoples' will to survive, stay true to their ancestors, and fight amidst the hardships they face. Panaligan's photographs provide and revive our memories of the disenfranchised in our land, and in doing so, raise awareness of their conditions and struggle to survive. #

Brocka in a brave new world

It's time to feed the hackneyed scripts and copycat plots to the shredder. At a time when many mainstream local productions start to smack of the same telenovela or fantaserye sequence, young directors such as twenty-nine year old Sigfreid Barros-Sanchez are clearing a path through the repetitive rubble for the brave, new world of Philippine independent cinema.

His tools are works such as “Ang Anak ni Brocka” (finalist in the Cinema One Originals Digital Film Festival 2005) and “Lasponggols” (finalist, full-length feature category of the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival 2005), previously screened at the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the University of the Philippines Film Institute.

Mockumentar(t)ist

Sanchez was into varsity basketball, political science, writing, and alternative/underground music (not necessarily in that order) when he first viewed independent shorts by Jon Red and Roxlee in Humanities class way back when the peso was not as severely devalued as now. By 1999, he forayed into film after joining the 11th Ricky Lee Scriptwriting Workshop and studied directing under Marilou Diaz-Abaya in Ateneo. In 2000, he joined the 10th Cinema-As-Art Filmmaking Workshop at the UP under Tikoy Aguiluz and Raymond Red. In between, Sanchez also worked as a script reader for Viva Films, wrote and acted for TV shows and indie films, and took on advertising jobs while raising three kids.

These varied influences would later on define the 'feel' and vision of Sanchez' works, which (like that of many other indie film-makers) defy easy categorization. “Lasponggols”, a black comedy about two small-time film workers masquerading as cinema bigwigs in a remote barrio, is also an observation into the Philippine mainstream film industry. Meanwhile, Sanchez uses fiction to draw out truth in the mockumentary entitled “Ang Anak ni Brocka”. Here, A TV documentary crew pursue possibly the biggest gamble of the ratings game: an investigative report into the supposed existence of the celebrated and controversial Lino Brocka's son.

Their frenzied search for the late director’s missing progeny yields interviews with an array of reel and real-life characters: Brocka's province-mates, family, slum dwellers, unsuspecting 20-something college coeds, tambays along the street, co-workers in the film industry, and comrades in the activist movement.

The speculative—and protracted-- search for Brocka's elusive son takes them from Nueva Ecija (Brocka's hometown) to the University of the Philippines in Diliman, from stuffy offices of cinema workers to the slum areas of Brocka's films, from picket lines to gay bars and alleys. The protracted search also sheds light into many other details of Brocka's life, details that are largely lost to the twenty-something, post-EDSA 1 generation: the director’s homosexual orientation, his promdi roots at a time when UP was more socially “stratified”, his early exposure to theater and cinema as a stage-hand and actor, his quirks and ethics as the legendary film director, his being gay, his endless compassion as a sibling, and his passion for the masses as a fiery cultural worker and aktibista.

While the investigation and cut-throat competition from a rival network station yields an unexpected but equally intriguing conclusion, Sanchez's characters realize that the search has not been that futile nor foolhardy at all. They may have lost a scoop, but found themselves and a little bit more of Lino Brocka instead.

Brocka in every Pinoy

In 'Anak ni Brocka', Sanchez makes clever use of the “mockumentary”--mock documentary--format as a narrative means of telling the various truths about Brocka's life and work. Sanchez manages to intersect scripted satire and spontaneity, parody and preaching: raw reactions and carefully-scripted performances, clips from the director's films with present-day shots of these same sites, sound bytes and pontifications. Sanchez juxtaposes the actual and the contrived and finally ferrets out truths through fiction.

The film is certainly not a glossed-over eulogy nor something akin to a commemorative plaque: it tries to depict Brocka complete with all his flaws and foibles. But what makes 'Anak ni Brocka' more compelling for the contemporary crowd is its power to bring us back to the maw of what the late director stood for. Sanchez reclaims Brocka for the masses by bringing his memory back to the ordinary Juan dela Cruz, by bringing the film back to the alleys and slums of Manila which formed an integral part of the director's landscapes.

Sanchez democratizes Brocka. He makes his memory accessible and tangible not only to his colleagues in cinema, but to the ordinary person. Brocka is not only for the intelligentsia, the bakla, the tibak, but for all those who know how it is to be lost, poor, fatherless, oppressed and vulnerable. The beauty of Sanchez's film is that it makes one realize that Brocka's struggles are not exclusive to a small coterie of connoisseurs, but to every person who knows how it is to live with passion and pride: how it is to stand by being Filipino, and gay, and militant; how it is to side with the masses; how it is to demand nothing but the best; how it is to call for change and indignation in the face of injustice and lies.

Sanchez' way of representing the late director's life is certainly irreverent and witty, bordering on the blasphemous for some. But what better way to pay tribute to a great man—better than laying laurel wreaths or creating marble busts-- than to infuse an awareness of and passion for the same things Lino Brocka stood for in life in one's audience?

In the end, the entire search for Brocka's lost progeny reaches its conclusion in its metaphorical, rather than biological, roots. The point of it all is underscored in a scene where the weary reporters trudge through a demolition-prone squatters area, searching for the twenty-something man named Angelino dela Cruz who held a megaphone to his mouth and rallied the urban poor to fight for their rights. A local who claims that the boy has since then left the slums to wage a “higher level of struggle” reaffirms his faith that the guy was indeed a child of the late director. “Madaling pekein ang histura, pero hindi ang ugali at buhay ni Brocka,” he says.

It's the 'little people' that count

The success of 'Anak ni Brocka' is based on its sincerity of intention. Sanchez belongs to a brave, new generation of Filipino/a film-makers who are out to tell the truths of our time, although not always through the direct and straight-to-the-point interrogation of documentary film-making (another of the notable developments in contemporary Philippine film).

For all the tongue-in-cheek parody and street-smart satire they exude, 'Sig's' films are out to represent the realities of the marginalized and to document the peripheral. For Sanchez, the practice of independent film-making was a venue to give the little people of Philippine cinema and society a time to be represented on their own terms.

While he has also directed popular music videos (such as Kyla's 'Til They Take My Heart Away' and Sugarfree's 'Hari ng Sablay', for which he was named the Best Director at the recent Awit Awards), Sanchez frankly admits that he has no illusions of these being the penultimate product of artistic expression and vision.

“Sa films na ginawa ko, I feel I have an obligation na na gawin siyang pangmulat ng mata. Sa music videos, busog sila sa pisikal na aspeto. Sa films ko I want them na mabusog sa utak at mas lalong magutom pa at mauhaw na maghanap ng mga ganitong klaseng pelikula,” he explains.

Sanchez is aware of the limitations of his forays into indie film-making as a form of social commentary. “My films will not change the state of the film industry kasi malaking sindikato na ang mainstream cinema...pero [they] can create an awareness sa mga nangyayari sa loob ng industriya, lalo na doon sa mga hindi nakakapasok,” he said.

The highest affirmation of one's vocation comes from the very people the artist intends to reach out to. In Sanchez's case, it came from the twenty-somethings of today, the generation that which was practically non-existent when Marcos was booted out and which was barely into puberty when EDSA 2 came around.

“The best feedbacks I got for Brocka were from the students themselves who tell me after the screening na 'salamat po, kasi hindi namin kilala si Lino Brocka until we watched your film', he says.

It also came from the appreciation from the “little people” of the Philippine industry: the technicians, the utility boys, the clappers, the writers and artists, the entire collective crew of labor that makes big productions possible.

“The biggest comment I got [for Lasponggols] was when they were showing it sa Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) during Cinemalaya. The projectionist, his crew, and even the ushers of CCP thanked me for making a film that [voiced] out the concerns of the little people like them. Hindi man sila taga-pelikula, nakaka-relate sila dun sa problema ng mga characters na taga-pelikula na mabababa ang suweldo, walang SSS, at pinaka-inaabuso,” he said.

Of course, the avowal to reach out to this audience necessitates the use of strategies to popularize film as a public practice. Sanchez is aware of the cultural and economic barriers that bar the masses from viewing movies, and sees the need to go “indie” in terms of the distribution of cultural products such as films. If one can't bring the man or woman in the street to the cinema, then take the cinema to the streets.

“Tayo na mismo ang lumapit sa audience. Dalhin nating sa mga squatters area at mga eskwelahan ang mga pelikula natin...hindi sila pupunta sa mga sinehan kasi wala silang pera o may mas mahahalagang paggagamitan nito,” he said.

“The Indonesian, Malaysian and the Korean young film-makers, isasampa lang nila sa pick-up van nila mga gamit nila at ipapalabas ang mga pelikula sa iba't ibang towns at schools na madadaanan nila. Naniningil lang sila ng pang-gas at pantsibog tapos larga na ulit. Dapat may ganoon tayong attitude,” Sanchez enthuses.

Such a practice is being done, for instance, by progressive and equally independent film-makers from groups such as Southern Tagalog Exposure, SIPAT, and TUDLA. Their documentaries--on issues ranging from human rights violations arising from militarization, urban poor youth, and the Hacienda Luisita massacre—are being projected on makeshift screens in picket lines, plazas, and classrooms.

“Punk's not dead”

For Sanchez and other indie film-makers, the recent recognition and support for their works is positive in the sense that may inspire another generation of artists who will continue with the vision and spirit of indie film-making. He encourages younger film-makers to “watch as many films as they can, listen to as many good songs and lyrics as they can, shoot films with their cameras for as long as they finally create their own obras, and finally be sensitive to the things around them because they are part of society and not just mere lookers”.

But more than being just reflective of what they see in society, Sanchez challenges younger film-makers to be critical, to question the status quo and its aesthetic and even political standards of Philippine cinema in order to come up with new ways of seeing.

“Siguro, kailangan mo lang ilabas yung “punk” in you, the activist in you na 'anti-' sa halos lahat. Then you'll see and discover new things in film-making,” he says.

[An]d don't forget the kid in you, the passionate kid in you,” he adds.

Despite the current state of the film industry, Sanchez looks forward to the day when Filipinos will begin to define more clearly and more explicitly a national aesthetic for Philippine cinema, when we will see “younger filmmakers who will be armed with very, very good and original stories that will tell very, very Filipino films to the world,” he said.

“We just copy trends now. Asian horror, Iranian films, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Korean love stories, etc,” he enumerates. “Kung may sampung indie filmmakers na magkukuwento ng mga istoryang very honest sa totoong kalagayan ng bansa...we'll really see a new wave of films na bumabangga talaga sa sistemang nakaugalian na,” he says.

“Takot na tayo sa katotohanan. Nakalimutan natin na hindi natapos ang laban nung mamatay sina Brocka at Bernal. Nagsisimula pa lang,” Sanchez asserts.

“Andami pang tulog. Andami pang hindi mulat,” he says, referring to the current state of the nation. But for as long as film-makers prevail in the conviction that images can be used to change the world, however futile it may sound to the jaded ear, we can always wager that Philippine cinema will continue to be relevant to its audiences in the same way that Brocka's opuses delivered their own slaps back at the dictatorship back then.

In a time when fleeing a politically and economically-unstable country seems a tempting option, Filipinos can always find strength in the fact that film-makers such as Sanchez will always be there with their cameras and scripts as part of the struggle: to direct, to act, to write and speak, to clear the cluttered path of images lying ahead of us and to clean up the mess left behind. He may not always be seated in the director's chair or standing in the spotlight, Sanchez foresees. But like the little people of Lasponggols, he will always be on call when needed.

“Kahit taga-timpla ng kape at taga-serve ng tubig gagawin ko. Basta kasama pa rin sa gera,” he ends. #