- How did your practice as a curator start?
I studied art history in the university and graduate school. This was my entry point into curatorial practice. To evoke and render a context for art might have been a way for me to fulfill a basic curatorial function of bringing forms together and annotating the assembly, not to mention representing the social and cultural world the art is believed to be inhabiting or mediating, sometimes affirmatively but also sometimes critically. I learned art history within a Humanities perspective, a liberal arts orientation that was more integrative than specialist. In many ways, it was interdisciplinary, inflected by cultural politics that may have come from activism and anthropology. This, too, was vital in the formation of my curatorial work. That I was a critic of mass media and the performing arts and I wrote my dissertation on a film actress further widened the art-historical and curatorial interest.
- In an interview with Ocula Magazine last January 2020, you mentioned that you experienced living in different locations around the Philippines and that gave you an appreciative perspective on the provinces of our country. How does a varied local cultural experience help you in engaging with different cultures in foreign-based projects?
I think the encounter with different aspects of the islands in the Visayas as I was growing up and studying in public schools introduced me to varied environments as well as languages and social backgrounds. It gave me an opportunity to experience a series of localities that was not the center and did not pretend to the national. My family moved around quite a lot and so every two years, I would learn a new language, live in another neighborhood, and make new friends. So to some extent, the local/not local binary never became a dominant dynamic. It was more the inter-local or inter-island that was prominent, so that the non-local or the center or the foreign was a matter of traversal and not an unyielding ground, open to translation and not ensconced as a singular idiom.
- When you work abroad to participate in biennales, how do you approach other backgrounds and culture and if you do, how do you apply it to your curatorial practice in the Philippines?
I am interested in things that are new to me or that appear to be related to what I can already imagine. These “other cultures” for me are part of a broad ecology and constellation that might have affinities with “our cultures.” Going back and forth between the “other” and the “our” clarifies, or complicates, this ecology and this constellation. I also look at the Philippines as inclined to other sites, and vice-versa. I am taken by interlocution, not diffusion. The curatorial is comparative, the basis of which is shaped by constant interlocution.
- In your experience participating in events held abroad, what were the stereotypes that you have encountered about Philippine art and how did you respond to them?
These stereotypes stem from ideological expectations and the pressures to represent the culture or the art world with a level of legibility or intelligibility within a relatively settled syntax. In other words, there are certain signatures that are prone to capture or recognition. For the Philippines, it might be the immersion in exceptional colonialism and therefore of corruption; the entanglement with tradition or the remediation of the latter within mixed and eccentric forms. It might be the reference to an incendiary political life in relation to intense disparities along the fault lines of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on. Stereotypes are instructive because they lay bare tensions between flux and consolidation. Curatorial work does not finesse these tensions, it creates a condition for these to play out and mutate into fairer and more rightful and equivalent gestures.
- In terms of collaborating with curators from abroad during an international event, what experience challenged you the most as an art curator from the Philippines that believes in intergenerational mentorship?
I am drawn to idiosyncratic propositions and so I always look forward to learning from curators of a different generation. I am keen to know about what keeps their minds busy and what inspires them. I would like to be attuned to this wavelength. I am of the mind that young curators should curate the projects of their time not because they are the only ones who can do it, but because they have an intimate intuition of the current atmosphere and a great stake in charting the directions of the future.
- In an interview with ArtAsiaPacific last 2015 (https://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/93/PatrickDFlores), you talked about challenging the local-global dichotomy. What do you think are the ways we can showcase co-production of what is global through locality? Was there a difference in the process of co-production before the pandemic and the art scene in today’s “new normal”?
I think first of all one must envision locality as extensive and intricate, so that the hierarchy, the linearity, or the sequence from local to global is overcome. The challenge is how to facilitate co-production in the context of social distancing and limited movement between persons. But production does not always have to be physical. There are ways to communicate remotely and there are projects that may thrive on exchange elsewhere. This brisk movement enables us to ultimately challenge notions of both newness and normality that underlie the phrase “new normal.”
- Contemporary art in the Philippines remains to be a concept that society is yet to fully grasp. In your practice, how do you challenge or deal with art stereotypes during your local exhibitions?
Typicalities reveal certain patterns enforced by prevailing norms. They speak a lot to idealizations. To confront these idealizations is one moment in the curatorial practice. Critique is a moment as well. But curatorial practice is reconstructive, not idle institutional critique that deteriorates into cynicism and self-righteousness, stirs up discontent, and cannot calibrate the terms of complicity. This idleness is sad and usually afflicts people without grace and are consumed not so much by values but by hypocrisies.
- What would be your advice to younger curators that will help them in creating good working relationships with artists and art institutions?
They should be patient with the difficulties of a deliberative and collegial environment. They should sharpen their positions but also be sufficiently nimble when they navigate structures. Integrity and graciousness are paramount, the willingness to propose strategies. They should not be quick to be critical, or to cancel, and slow to come to terms with involvement. While they are embedded, they are also emergent. They are better served thinking of the afterlives of projects, which are best conceived in terms of scale and increment, and not the spectacle of virtues, or the virtues of spectacle.
- As the art world faces a pandemic, what do you think are the most important principles and main responsibilities of a curator in continuing to grasp the audience’s interest in museums and other art spaces?
Curators in the midst of a pandemic must revisit their resources and find ways to make them
accessible to the public, and not necessarily through exhibitions. The potential of institutions to enhance the energies of the public sphere must be harnessed through the discourse, the archive, and collaborations across constituencies.
- In light of the pandemic, what do you think is the biggest challenge to Filipino contemporary art curators today and how can society resolve them? Do you also see a new method of curatorship sprouting from the context of the “new normal”?
I think the idea of a proto-para curatorial practice can be pursued with interesting consequences. Alongside this is a curatorship that crawls across time and does not desire to be always punctual. It can be protracted at the same time that it is decisive, not so neurotic about autonomy and its attritions.