BLEMISH: A Filipino artist takes on political violence

By Philip Paraan

Blemish is a spo animate a socio political critique by way of a domestic metaphor wrought from an ideological premise.

Filipino performance artist Raquel de Loyola takes on the hounding issue of political violence in her country as she sets up a stinging installation-performance as her exhibition piece as one of the awardees in the 2009 Thirteen Artists Awards of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). In the Philippines’ next to the National Artists Award, this accolade is a prestigious award given to young artists by the country’s leading cultural agency.

De Loyola turns a scene of “labada” or laundry wash to a tormenting and bloody site, turning this banal domestic activity traditionally relegated mostly to women as an allusion of the extrajudicial killings including that of enforced disappearances within the Arroyo regime in the Philippines.

Cleansing in her work is a paradox, Loyola says. While it may seem like an act of sanitation, it is a sinister act of stifling every form of dissent against an unruly state.

To dramatize the brutal intentions state violence and its culture of impunity, she deliriously goes into crazed act of pounding a roomful of clean shirts and which are later soaked in synthetic blood.

This haunting work was originally conceived to be performed live and staged in a ricefield to provide a fitting sense of place in the countryside where most of these acts of political violence do occur among peasants and members of organized communities in the rural areas. However for the purpose of bringing the work to a wider audience, the show later decidedly turned into video-based.

Clothes splayed in an area with a mirror tucked right next to a heap where the image of a woman and all the clichés of domesticity can be gleaned. It is contradicted however by the frantic and emotionally extreme act invoking brute and death.

Personification of victims is an obvious reason in her use of clothes as her main device. Oftentimes, these are left as clues and pieces of evidences which tell each victim’s horrific tales. The bludgeoned shirts are then hanged and line up while the video of the process and performance is incorporated with an audio recording which plays a litany of names of victims. Its volume presents the extent of purge and abduction. At the time of the performance last July 2009, there were already 1010 victims. Hanging these symbolic imports suggest the lack of resolution.

Strong performative qualities can be gleaned from De Loyolas work, however the primacy of its political commentary takes lead before any technical and esthetic dimensions. The intention she pursues is to conjure up the evocations of state violence and of course resistance.

She has started preparing the show since December and had the help of families of victims to her complete her work.

While it plays to memory and senses the hundreds of victims. Interestingly, it is being staged at the CCP, a state institution of the same regime this socio-political critique is being directed to. Second, as a woman artist, Loyola reinforces to break the mythology that women are naturally tame and incapable of violence. Its disproof so starkly manifested by the fact the violence in this nation took peak in the regime of a woman president who considered herself the nation’s mother. Thus, significantly proffer some degree of feminist critique and class struggle in a confrontation of history and myth.

The performance certainly has its endurance in the theme it has chosen to tackle because the space of protest remains so stark. These issues of political violence continue to be grimly unresolved, the killings and disappearances still unabated.

In fact, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings, in his study, directly linked the state forces to these cases of political violence and that the government is accountable in effect because it condones these killings by not running after the perpetrators and glorifying its leading anti-insurgency agents.

Observers ask though De Loyola’s penchant for the use of blood. Personally, it is drawn from her own personal encounters with violence and abuse of the state. Her past persistently shape her activism and art. Pretty much of De Loyola’ work s pervasively moves and spiral into and out of a drain: the rambling, recursive internal monologues dealing of struggles and resistance.

De Loyola is no stranger to the cause. As an activist artist, she herself has long been in popular struggles. It is no surprise that she was bestowed an honor to be part of the prestigious CCP Thirteeen Artists Award an award because of her provocative and sustained work in the past years.

When she’s not busily engaged in her art projects, she’s surely out in the streets. Taking a full stride in her career, her performances have been exposed in a number of international art events. Her work “SATISFACTION” was featured at the Performer Stammtisch, Berlin in October 2008. It depicted the process of consuming and selling (oneself) in times of global market from her special Asian perspective.

Artists like De Loyola her belong to a rarefied cross disciplinary genus. Limited by canvas and other media, she decidedly transcended her art into performance because of its more unrestricted and liberating process.

She had a training of classical music at the University of the Philippines Extension Program and later studied Fine Arts with a major in Painting at the Philippine Women’s University. In 2002-2003, she studied Gamelan Karawitan at the Institute Seni Indonesia, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.