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Budols and bargains @ BLTX!

My zine collection so far... not including those made by my students in class! It's quite hard to believe that I've only just started my era of zine collecting in the early months of 2024 ~ I feel as though I've been amassing a collection of zines for much much longer and perhaps it's because I find too many inanimate and ephemeral things to have cultural and timely value.

Zinester gatherings like BLTX (acronym for Better Living Through Xerography) - which happens bi-annually - have provided such a perfect opportune for me to become a fully pledged hoarder of ephemera. I never knew there would be a way for me justify my strange sentiments to random pieces of receipts and paper (zines have showed me that there was such a way of design and curation for these things).

Recently at 98B Collaboratory a roundtable event was held called "Taking Care of Your Zines" amongst artists whom are also within the zinester circuits and have collected a plethora of them over the years. Sadly I had missed this roundtable discussion (as I spent a week and a bit gallivanting in Cambodia), because surely as my zine collection is only expected to multiply, I need to find a way of storing them correctly. I remember one artist friend based in Laguna, Czar Kristoff, bringing to SSPACE COFFEE (a roadside café on the way to Tagaytay) transparent duraboxes filled with the zines he gathered from artists and friends all over the world, whilst I am still keeping them in reused paper bags or cellophane pouches.

In another log I'll feature some of these zines and why they interest me. Whilst most times I resort to mindless purchases, I think I'm beginning to have a particular "taste" for specific sort of zines.

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When the die has been cast

Lyra Garcellano, Land, Labor, Life: Tracing ‘Progress’ In Selected Notes, (2024), Finale Art File.

After a morning of meetings scoping different archives in Manila, I managed to slice a bit of time in the afternoon to drop by Lyra Garcellano’s solo exhibit at Finale Art File. The more historically grounded of the three currently on show in the gallery (hers taking up space in their smaller, more intimate, cove on the upper level), Land, Labor, Life is a commentary on the history of economy and labour in the Philippines; such is a recurring subject across the history of Philippine art but few might recognize the artwork that the exhibit takes off from - Francisco Goya's The Junta of the Philippines (or Junta de la Compañia de las Filipinas) painted in 1815.

Goya's is an interesting point of departure. As a painter of the Spanish Royal Court his works have shed light on the tumultuous political climate that he would witness throughout his lifetime, which included the overturning of the Bourbon monarchy to the Napoleon's occupation of Spain in 1808 (1). Goya was known to have admired the French Revolution and wished for a similar outcome of an enlightened liberation in his country (given that Spain was already facing a corrupt and bankrupt fate), but the atrocities imposed by the invasion's forceful hand will mire him further into despair in his later life. The Junta was painted much earlier than his Black Paintings though still anticipates the uncertainty that even liberation from the French in 1813, had invoked. The painting clearly documents an economic and politically conducive matter that will forever affect the trajectories of Philippine history and its present. So too would the Real de Compañia be subject to bankruptcy in their relatively short lifetime - for whatever hopes of abundant wealth they thought would be brought in from the Viceroyalty of New Spain (to which the Philippines was in the fringes of) had ended with the demise of the Acapulco trade and the corrupt system of labour across the archipelago. Goya's depiction of the Company's board members in session was perhaps his glimpse of optimism for the empire's future (because as the story goes, King Ferdinand VII made an entry into this meeting thus signaling the last strings of hope for Spanish sovereignty) , yet clearly a mark of disillusionment - a lack of foresight or relation as métropole and colony had always felt like worlds faraway from each other - by the people within the peninsula, given that subsequent events over the following decades in the nineteenth century would lead to Spain losing the entirety of its colonies to the rise of independent revolutions and rebellions by Latin American and Philippine intelligentsias.

There are uncanny similarities between Goya's illustrations of nightmares and Lyra's own sketches of images gathered from photographic archives; the indistinguishable faces of the indio working in the tobacco plantations suggests something very sinister at play. The vision of the Real Company as one that would lead Spain's robust monopolization of Philippine trade was overshadowed by the reality of its downfall. Following the withdrawal of the Company's presence in the 1830s, the Philippines became open to international trade - the cultivation of tobacco was one of its most successful exports which Spain had desperately clung on to. If Goya's is an ominous scene, Lyra's presents an unshakeable feeling of colonial persistence. It encourages us to reflect upon its pervasion in the present state of things, the monotony of greys throughout her sketches akin to shadow still being casted from the past. It isn't a far imagination of lies underneath our noses, that ease of keeping blind eyes to these modern serfdoms that sustain the economies for pineapple, banana, sugar, tobacco, textile and Filipino labour.

Entanglements in history can be forgotten over the generations as the nation fights invokes its own sovereignty. This would be determined centuries ago. In 2016, Jesuit cartographer Pedro Murillo Velarde's hydrographical map of the Philippines had put the country in favor of gaining international recognition for their claim against China during the territorial arbitration at The Hague. (2) (Quelled, at times, are some overlapping claims also presented by Vietnam - but this is another matter). Battles for sovereignty are funny fickle things. Where the Philippines is concerned, the concept of a sovereign right might as well be a borrowed one: of course when Murillo-Velarde had constructed this map in 1734, this was in the best of Spain's economic interests, and definitely not for the unity of a "Filipino" nation (which willeventually be decided much much later). The use of maps, for territorial claims harks back to a time when unclaimed seas and terrains were easier to carve out and subdue on the basis of empires being able to say so and the treaties that sealed the terms and conditions of their contracts. In the history of territorial disputes, lines of demarcation were agreed upon but still ambiguities, uncertainties, and other infidelities to allegiances remained (perhaps the ocean's expanse had meant that even those who were doing the conquering had a tendency to be confused on whose land they were on). According to The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and Zaragoza (1529) for example, the Philippines is still fully within the Portuguese claim to territory. However because of their lack of dispute to Spanish presence (possibly because the Portuguese had their sights solely intent on expanding their spice trade - which the Philippines did not have an abundance of) had meant their rival assumed that this set of islands would ultimately be theirs for the taking, fait accompli.

Concerning the political and economic state of things in the disputed zone, exercising claims to sovereign rights over land or sea, as Things Before Us would show through the overlapping of islands for sale, over EDCA sites, and finally over the 1734 map that can be seen through the thin sheet of vellum paper, is a matter that conjures the ghostly presence of the past - underlying, both literally and figuratively, the reality of today's miry landscape of extraction and exploitation. To speak of "progress" does not bequeath consolation: the Philippines always seems to chronically be within the best of interests of things other than itself.

I, too, share Lyra's sentiments in this lamentation. The die has been cast long ago, it seems.

References

(1) To digress on the complications and complexity of these imperial relationships between France and Spain: even prior to Napoleonic occupation, the two empires were already historically tied by centuries of territorial disputes and frankly, by blood (See: Spanish War of Succession). Despite these tensions, Spain was recognized as an automatic ally of France. And whatever slow and arduous downfall Spain was already experiencing over the course of the eighteenth century, Napoleon's entry had just accelerated it. The war initiated by Napoleon and Joseph Bonaparte, whilst tyrannical, was an attempt to strategise: seeing that Spain already had repeated succession of corruptions by those in power, not to mention severely bankrupt (despite the influx of wealth from the New World), at the same time making very unreliable ally (with Manuel Godoy calling upon the Grand Alliance), Napoleon saw it fit to invade and re-establish power.

(2) Library of Congress, Carta hydrographica y chorographica de las Yslas Filipinas : dedicada al Rey Nuestro Señor por el Mariscal d. Campo D. Fernando Valdes Tamon Cavallo del Orden de Santiago de Govor. Y Capn. ; Raul Dancel, "The Rare map that bolstered Philippines' case in territorial dispute with China sold for $1 million", The Straits Times, (2016), <https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/rare-map-that-bolstered-philippines-case-in-territorial-dispute-with-china-sold-for> [accessed July 2, 2024].

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In the Presence of Buddhas

In the presence of an assembly of Buddhas: some lacquered in black, or painted red, some shrouded in a layer of gold leaf - others a combination of all. Evident is the inevitable patina of time on their surface. I wonder, though, about their display - the interiors of Buddhist temples comes to mind where all Buddhas (should) face East. At the same time (and this might be my ignorance betraying me) there is something quite unsettling when taking in their sight.

These standing Buddhas wear a monastic robe with other elements on their garb indicating attributes of an Angkor, Khmer style (1). Most display the gesture of the abhaya mudra ("dispelling fear") where both forearms are outstretched and palms faced in the open - a sign of reassurance, a signal of peace. In attempt to maintain this peace, I walk slowly toward them, ogling at their hands from a respectful distance and closing in on the details on their palms. Energies exude from their hands through circular ripples or lotuses adorned with a reflective surface at its centre. Quite a phantasmal encounter.

National Museum of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. July 21, 2024

References

(1) National Museum of Cambodia, Standing Adorned Buddha, <https://www.cambodiamuseum.info/en_collection/bronze_object/standing_adorned_buddha.html>