Mark Salvatus
Araw na nakapitapita (That Day Most Eagerly Awaited), 2017, mural drawing, HD video, 22:05 min.
TheCube Project Space
Mark Salvatus’ That Day Most Eagerly Awaited presents and explores the home as a thriving ecology. The COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed our homes into spaces of shelter and confinement with its spaces simultaneously shielding, yet isolating us from the outside world. The work and its multiple components of video, archival materials, mural, and drawings largely take from a short story the artist’s grandfather published in a Philippine magazine in 1993 about a hermit and a golden bull that lived in Mount Banahaw in Quezon province in Luzon island.
From within the installation, you see the artist activating his home by constructing a view of the world from within its confines. He references his family’s archive to build a network of associations that span local history, folklore, communal yearnings and shared desires. Fusing his grandfather’s writings of fiction with stories of the Philippine revolution he remakes the home as a space that is timeless and without bounds. Through interwoven texts and materials, the work presents an encompassing view of a world remade through fiction and fantasy wherein locality is central and the folk becomes universal. This speaks to an agency forged by anticipation and a desire for transformation.
－Curator｜Tessa Maria Guazon
Mark Salvatus
(b. 1980, Lucban, Philippines; based in Manila, Philippines) Since 2006, the artist call my overall artistic project as Salvage Projects working across various disciplines and media. Basing it on the word ‘salvage’ or to save or rescue which is also the meaning of my surname, he try to build direct and indirect engagements using objects, photography, archives, videos, installations, participatory projects, and platform organizing that present different outcomes of energies and experiences. His preoccupations are based on constant movements and travels—coming from the countryside to the city and elsewhere, addressing and building new imaginations of the contemporary land—urban and rural, the global migrant and the vernacular historiographies. He is interested in communication and miscommunication as a form and as a structure and not as a process. A form that is unstable, vulnerable and precarious as a fluid form and not fixed or established. A practice that deals a lot with collecting, repetition and series based on his lived experiences and its relationship to the world.
Curator : Tessa Maria Guazon
Tessa Maria Guazon is a curator and educator based in Manila. She developed the proposal for the Southeast Asia Neighborhood Network during the ICI workshop in Manila. This is a research project with women artists Alma Quinto and Nathalie Dagmang with pedagogy as a central goal. She is part of the interlocutor program for the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial organized by the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. She is the coordinator for Exhibitions and Curatorial Analysis for the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. Her current project for the network considers curation and curating as collectivist practices. In 2019, she launched Curating in Local Contexts workshops with colleagues Louise Salas and Mayumi Hirano. The workshops aim to understand how curation is practiced in the Philippines, within specific conditions of possibilities and constraints.
