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Notes from "Periphery" |
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Joy Mallari
To be critical of memory is to grapple with the word miss. On the one hand, it implies forgetting or oversight.
On the other, it insinuates nostalgia and even melancholia for loss. In the liminal tension between these tendencies is some
sort of a penumbra, a time and a space in which limits are tested and extensities explored. In Philippine folk culture, it is a
moment when talismans renew their potencies, the hour between light and dark when structures are most vulnerable to the
exposure of revision and phantasmatic mutations
Joy Mallari recollects an album of references to the Philippines as provenance and most likely as providence
wherever it may find abode or belonging in an 'elsewhere.' It can be said, following an anthropologist of stature, that this
place called home may be "in pieces," parceled out as commodity or traded as body. However way, Mallari gathers bits
and pieces of Philippine possessions, the fruits of history nurtured in her memory, as if in a harvest of a translocal pastoral
without Amorsolo's romanticized sun, but laden nevertheless with the goods of a shifting earth. In this reaping, the artist
recasts her eye over the appearancess of home on which a shadow lends its screen. or of an image of a migrant novelist. a
poet in exile, whose persona is suspended in translucent resin, shaped like a fruit, 'sheer' in its 'reality.'
This can only be very telling as Carlos Bulosan's well-known novel titled America is in the Heart speaks of the
struggle of Filipinos against the agricultural interests of big business in the United States. Mallari's memory of her
country
-the nipa hut is prominent in this repertoire of icons that forms the wall and ceiling of a cultural
habitation/habitus-- intersects with Bulosan's remapping of the terrain of America as a 'land of opportunity.' Such
cultivation. which strikes at the heart of the idea of culture. of a critical memory of 'home' and 'abroad' stakes out a
fertile field of engagement with history and art's own toil. For as Bulosan so valiantly put it: "The most decisive move
that the writer could make was to take his stand with the workers."
Patrick D. Flores is an art critic and Chairperson of the Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines.
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