SUSUNOD / UPCOMING
1st-2nd Quarter 2023Conferences 10-11 / RE-POSING: RESISTANCE, RESPIRATION, RESOLUTION with UltraSpirit Nest (Staci Bu Shea, Alfred Marasigan, Renan Laru-an, Jason Dy, SJ) and Ultradependent Public School
Sign language interpretation by Jerwin Darag
Apr 16 16:00h Utrecht
Apr 16 22:00h Manila
IRL
BAK Auditorium
Pauwstraat 13A
NL-3512 TG Utrecht
ONLINE
Stream eternalconferences.cargo.site/
Stream + Chat twitch.tv/eternalconferences
Thus Gotama [Buddha] walked toward the town to gather alms, and the two samanas recognized him solely by the perfection of his repose, by the calmness of his figure, in which there was no trace of seeking, desiring, imitating, or striving, only light and peace.
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
In the spirit of Ultramethods as the sixth mode of the Ultradependent Public School (UPS) offered by the Community Portal Team at BAK (basis voor actuele kunst), Utrecht, The Netherlands, the Ultraspirit Nest offers an art curriculum entitled Re-Posing: Resistance, Respiration, and Resolution.
Filipino contemporary artists, Alfred Benedict Marasigan and Jason Dy, SJ along with international curators Staci Bu Shea (b. Miami, US) and Renan Laru-an (b. Cotabato, PH) inhabit the Ultraspirit Nest as individuals interested in exploring the notions of care/nurture and control/subjugation, mortality/death and existence/life, as well as rituals/gestures and mediums/objects. These embodied and tensive experiences are posed to be reconsidered in the light of the new order/disorder brought about by the global pandemic.
Through the hybrid platform (online + onsite) of interaction, Marasigan, Dy, Bu Shea, and Laru-an embark on a pilgrimage of visiting sacred spaces like a hospice, a chapel, and a cemetery in Utrecht as sites of communing with the spiritual realm and the earthly abode. Though the march starts in solitude and silence with a small community, it will progress into a public sphere of exchange, education, and exhibition for the whole duration of the curriculum from 1st April to 27th May 2023.
Renan brings his critical perspectives to curatorial research and practice. He is keen on resisting comfortable and convenient perceptions of reality in order to sharpen the agency of discerning the underlying skeletons and spirits. His interests on the “’insufficient’ and ‘subtracted’ images or subjects at the juncture of development and integration projects” (cf. DIA, online) are essential in curating this art curriculum. Dy creates an installation of embroidered textiles with some archival documents in partnership with Talleres de Nazaret (Quezon City, PH) that essays on labor/activity and leisure/rest; translation of medium from floral arrangements of tulips to photography and embroidery; and employment of the work as learning objects to study the embodied experiences of repose. Bu Shea, on the other hand, examines the lived aesthetic and real poetry of diminishment, death, and dignity. Her transdisciplinary research project calledDying Livingly is an exploration into what it means to live intimately with death and grief, with artistic and cultural productions that form a bridge to her practice as an end-of-life guide and death companion. To provide the platform of conversation and discourse of the curriculum, artist and Ateneo de Manila instructor Marasigan provides a live educational resource called Eternal Conferences. Through this online multi-exchange “between (real) time, digital anthropology, and various forms of communal and decolonized knowledge production” (Eternal Conferences, online), the ideas, activities, and programs of the Ultraspirit nest are broadcasted, democratized, and decentralized.
The conjunctions in between the concepts proposed in this art curriculum reflect the reality of creative tensions of the Ultraspirit that cannot be resolved. Yet, as proponents, Marasigan, Dy, Bu Shea, and Laru-an are resolute in brewing ideas into spirited encounters. Perhaps, like Gotama [Buddha], the experience will provide them (and together with their public and communities) with a sense of levity and gravitas. (AM+DG)
💐💀💐
As a follow-up of sorts of Trainings for the Not-Yet (2019/2020) convened by BAK and artist Jeanne van Heeswijk and Clara Balaguer with multiple collaborators in Utrecht and beyond, UPS rehearses the idea of an exhibition as a series of trainings, this time configured as the bones of a temporary school. Acting as UPS’s agent faculty ahead of the project, seven study nodes spent months doing outreach and field work to construct a curriculum informed by a current landscape. Each through a specific realm of inquiry, they have labored toward an understanding of how both collective and individual agency could manifest in processes of learning, despite—and because of—structures that have failed us.
Ultradependent Public School is a curriculum to learn what we really need to enact the worlds we really want. UPS is co-convened with an extended faculty of students, educators, and practitioners. Emphasizing study as a radically collective, public labor that lives in-between institutionalized hierarchies, UPS inhabits the edges between formal classrooms and everyday life. It navigates kitchens, print shops, housing squats, community centers, garages, radio stations, hallways, and sidewalks as sites of study.
MGA NAKARAANG PAGTITIPON / PAST CONFERENCES
2nd-4th Quarter 2022
Conferences 8-9 / CULTURAL REMITTANCE PAWNSHOPPE | Episode 1
THE SHELL AND THE WOUND
Alfred Marasigan & Meenakshi Thirukode
Sign language interpretation by Jerwin Darag
Sept 17 18:00h The Hague
Sept 18 00:00h Manila (+1)
Sept 17 21:30h Delhi
IRL
Page Not Found
Boekhorststraat 126-128
Den Haag
ONLINE
Stream eternalconferences.cargo.site/
Stream + Chat twitch.tv/eternalconferences
(^_-)≡☆
SYNOPSIS
(^_-)≡☆
Meenakshi Thirukode presents her work through the archetype of The Wound inflicted in the act of seeking change and justice. Hierarchical structures of race, gender, caste,* and class seek to protect themselves, picking at any attempts of this wound to heal over. Alfred Marasigan presents his work through the archetype of the shell, specifically the nautilus shell. His interest in how time is lived, quantified, politicized in different territories suggests, through the shell, other readings of queerness, danger, anachronism, and the body. For this episode, Cultural Remittance Pawnshoppe nests within the skin of Eternal Conferences, a livestreamed educational resource and art space.
This is a hybrid event. You can attend in person at Page Not Found’s space in the Hague or online via Eternal Conferences website or Twitch.
*Meenakshi would like to acknowledge that she belongs to an oppressor caste as a UC/Savarna and will speak from this position.
(つ≧▽≦)つ
ABOUT THE PAWNSHOPPE
(つ≧▽≦)つ
To Be Determined (Primary Cell: Meenakshi Thirukode and Clara Balaguer) build a series of long distance remittance sessions at Page Not Found, featuring people who are intimate with migratory realities as a lifestyle that begets archetypes for a practice. Whether by fleeing further South, draining towards the North, or exiting contested "centers" and "canons," their work explores what exists on the margins, not because it lacks value but because it has been grossly misclassified—by empire, patriarchy, casteism, or any other intersectional oppressions—as unremarkable.
In the spirit of informal remittance, both Balaguer and Thirukode have proposed a series of conversational alchemies, mixing guests across their personal networks in India and the Philippines. They ask each guest to present their work in light of an archetype they are practicing, researching, or becoming that is somehow made possible by the modes of flight described by migration. A casual publication will be gathered from notes and references shared for each session.
(^_<)～☆
GRATITUDE
(^_<)～☆
This episode of Cultural Remittance Pawnshoppe is made possible by a generous institutional consortium between the Collecting Otherwise research group at Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), Page Not Found (The Hague), and PrintRoom (Rotterdam).
SLI by Jerwin Darag
Mirjam Dalire is a multidisciplinary artist based in Negros Oriental, Philippines. She works with photography, internet-based installation, video, sound, and painting. Mirjam often uses virtual spaces as a staging point for confrontations with her immediate environment, employing satire and humor in her process.
┬┴┬┴┤·ω·)ﾉ
BIOS
┬┴┬┴┤·ω·)ﾉ
ALFRED MARASIGAN (Batangas, Libra Water Monkey) is an artist and educator who conducts serendipitous research and transmedial practices primarily through livestreaming, heavily inspired by emotional geography, Norwegian slow TV, and magic realism. Such format, often via social media, anchors his current explorations on simultaneity, sustainability, solidarity, and sexuality. He has been a faculty member of Ateneo de Manila University’s Department of Fine Arts since 2013.
THE SHELL AND THE WOUND
Alfred Marasigan & Meenakshi Thirukode
Sign language interpretation by Jerwin Darag
Sept 17 18:00h The Hague
Sept 18 00:00h Manila (+1)
Sept 17 21:30h Delhi
IRL
Page Not Found
Boekhorststraat 126-128
Den Haag
ONLINE
Stream eternalconferences.cargo.site/
Stream + Chat twitch.tv/eternalconferences
(^_-)≡☆
SYNOPSIS
(^_-)≡☆
Meenakshi Thirukode presents her work through the archetype of The Wound inflicted in the act of seeking change and justice. Hierarchical structures of race, gender, caste,* and class seek to protect themselves, picking at any attempts of this wound to heal over. Alfred Marasigan presents his work through the archetype of the shell, specifically the nautilus shell. His interest in how time is lived, quantified, politicized in different territories suggests, through the shell, other readings of queerness, danger, anachronism, and the body. For this episode, Cultural Remittance Pawnshoppe nests within the skin of Eternal Conferences, a livestreamed educational resource and art space.
This is a hybrid event. You can attend in person at Page Not Found’s space in the Hague or online via Eternal Conferences website or Twitch.
*Meenakshi would like to acknowledge that she belongs to an oppressor caste as a UC/Savarna and will speak from this position.
(つ≧▽≦)つ
ABOUT THE PAWNSHOPPE
(つ≧▽≦)つ
To Be Determined (Primary Cell: Meenakshi Thirukode and Clara Balaguer) build a series of long distance remittance sessions at Page Not Found, featuring people who are intimate with migratory realities as a lifestyle that begets archetypes for a practice. Whether by fleeing further South, draining towards the North, or exiting contested "centers" and "canons," their work explores what exists on the margins, not because it lacks value but because it has been grossly misclassified—by empire, patriarchy, casteism, or any other intersectional oppressions—as unremarkable.
In the spirit of informal remittance, both Balaguer and Thirukode have proposed a series of conversational alchemies, mixing guests across their personal networks in India and the Philippines. They ask each guest to present their work in light of an archetype they are practicing, researching, or becoming that is somehow made possible by the modes of flight described by migration. A casual publication will be gathered from notes and references shared for each session.
(^_<)～☆
GRATITUDE
(^_<)～☆
This episode of Cultural Remittance Pawnshoppe is made possible by a generous institutional consortium between the Collecting Otherwise research group at Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), Page Not Found (The Hague), and PrintRoom (Rotterdam).
SLI by Jerwin Darag
Mirjam Dalire is a multidisciplinary artist based in Negros Oriental, Philippines. She works with photography, internet-based installation, video, sound, and painting. Mirjam often uses virtual spaces as a staging point for confrontations with her immediate environment, employing satire and humor in her process.
┬┴┬┴┤·ω·)ﾉ
BIOS
┬┴┬┴┤·ω·)ﾉ
ALFRED MARASIGAN (Batangas, Libra Water Monkey) is an artist and educator who conducts serendipitous research and transmedial practices primarily through livestreaming, heavily inspired by emotional geography, Norwegian slow TV, and magic realism. Such format, often via social media, anchors his current explorations on simultaneity, sustainability, solidarity, and sexuality. He has been a faculty member of Ateneo de Manila University’s Department of Fine Arts since 2013.
MEENAKSHI
THIRUKODE is a writer, researcher, educator and feminist killjoy based in
NewDelhi, India. Her areas of research include the role of culture,
collectivity and micro-politics from the POV of a queer femme subjectivity,
located within the realm of a trans-nomadic, transient network of individuals
and institutions. She runs ‘School of IO’, which is a space of unlearning,
dedicated to navigating ‘study’, as a radical tool of political agency.
JERWIN DARAG is a corporate researcher analyst. He has worked in the local government unit of Makati under Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office, Administrative Section. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Office Administration from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines and has studied sign language in the Philippine Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf.
CLARA BALAGUER is a cultural worker and grey literature circulator. Frequently, she operates under collective or individual aliases that disclose her stewardship in any given project, the latest of which is To Be Determined.
ETERNAL CONFERENCES is a live educational resource and art space that aims to bring together people from different fields and practices to talk about intersections between (real) time, digital anthropology, and various forms of communal and decolonized knowledge production. It is Inspired by never ending zoom calls and conversations as journeys.
TO BE DETERMINED is a loosely organized structure for leaking access to cultural capital, recently migrated to Rotterdam from Parañaque City. TBD is a network of sleeper cells curious about models of non-extractive research, diasporic remittance flows, rehabilitating the body public/published body, mutual industry, and secretarial agency.
ε=ε=ε=ε=┌(;￣▽￣)┘
CONTEXT
ε=ε=ε=ε=┌(;￣▽￣)┘
In the Global South, money remittance centers provide an alternative banking system for the underdocumented (which is distinct from the undocumented) to access liquid capital. Precarity breeds a difficult relationship with official documentation. The bureacratic procedures for achieving certain kinds of documentation are often obtuse, designed for inefficiency. They may be written in colonially imposed languages (English, Spanish, French, Dutch) that produce rejection or fear in the ex- or still-colonial "native." Financial and other forms of precarity compound difficulties for becoming documented. These citizens may be unable to pay bureaucratic fees for birth, marriage, or death certificates. These nominal fees for bureaucratic processing do not include hidden costs such as transportation to far-away municipal offices, taking unpaid leave from work to stand in line for hours, grooming and styling for vital first impressions that make or break one's bureaucratic fate, or even prohibitive costs for printing several copies of "biodata" sheets and multiple color ID photographs. Likewise, financial insecurity can turn a fixed official home address into an unattainable luxury. Thus, access to something as deceptively simple as a bank account—which requires two or more forms of official documentation that identify a fixed address—is out of reach for the underdocumented.
"Money remittance operations such as Remitly, Western Union, Ria—and in the Philippines, pawnshop chains such as Cebuana Lhuillier and Palawan Pawnshop—offer an easy alternative. With just a name and a cell phone number, financial capital can be liquified and mobilized. The exorbitant commission charged by these service providers is offset by the ease of transaction.
The post-colonial economies of countries such as the Philippines and India—where Balaguer and Thirukode come from, respectively—suffer from a phenomenon called brain drain. Lack of financial, emotional, intellectual, and political opportunities to sustain dignified forms of life/study drive capable people to seek a livelihood elsewhere. This desired elsewhere is often the seat of a colonial power that mined the developing economy in the first place, relegating it to the state of dysfunction that provokes migratory exodus.
South/Eastern citizens-in-flight aspire to mobility through coveted working or travel visas. Once the visa is acquired, the kinship cells they are attached to—often large extended families linked as much by blood as by ties of personal debt/gratitude—may pin their fate to the fortunes of the visa holder. A culture of remittance emerges, built on the notion of duty and generosity. Those who are afforded the privilege of mobility support those who are excluded from capital access. A common final goal is family reunification, or the multiplication of visas for others to participate in the imperfect system of abundance and expand their physical and class mobility, which could rarely happen in their places of origin because empire predates European colonialism. (They did not invent the exercise of power, they merely hold some of it at the moment.) This is the basic framework of the post-colonial dream state, which by no means guarantees a happy ending. There are nuances of struggle in this story line, it mustn't be romanticized as a springboard for critical deliverance."
JERWIN DARAG is a corporate researcher analyst. He has worked in the local government unit of Makati under Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office, Administrative Section. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Office Administration from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines and has studied sign language in the Philippine Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf.
CLARA BALAGUER is a cultural worker and grey literature circulator. Frequently, she operates under collective or individual aliases that disclose her stewardship in any given project, the latest of which is To Be Determined.
ETERNAL CONFERENCES is a live educational resource and art space that aims to bring together people from different fields and practices to talk about intersections between (real) time, digital anthropology, and various forms of communal and decolonized knowledge production. It is Inspired by never ending zoom calls and conversations as journeys.
TO BE DETERMINED is a loosely organized structure for leaking access to cultural capital, recently migrated to Rotterdam from Parañaque City. TBD is a network of sleeper cells curious about models of non-extractive research, diasporic remittance flows, rehabilitating the body public/published body, mutual industry, and secretarial agency.
ε=ε=ε=ε=┌(;￣▽￣)┘
CONTEXT
ε=ε=ε=ε=┌(;￣▽￣)┘
In the Global South, money remittance centers provide an alternative banking system for the underdocumented (which is distinct from the undocumented) to access liquid capital. Precarity breeds a difficult relationship with official documentation. The bureacratic procedures for achieving certain kinds of documentation are often obtuse, designed for inefficiency. They may be written in colonially imposed languages (English, Spanish, French, Dutch) that produce rejection or fear in the ex- or still-colonial "native." Financial and other forms of precarity compound difficulties for becoming documented. These citizens may be unable to pay bureaucratic fees for birth, marriage, or death certificates. These nominal fees for bureaucratic processing do not include hidden costs such as transportation to far-away municipal offices, taking unpaid leave from work to stand in line for hours, grooming and styling for vital first impressions that make or break one's bureaucratic fate, or even prohibitive costs for printing several copies of "biodata" sheets and multiple color ID photographs. Likewise, financial insecurity can turn a fixed official home address into an unattainable luxury. Thus, access to something as deceptively simple as a bank account—which requires two or more forms of official documentation that identify a fixed address—is out of reach for the underdocumented.
"Money remittance operations such as Remitly, Western Union, Ria—and in the Philippines, pawnshop chains such as Cebuana Lhuillier and Palawan Pawnshop—offer an easy alternative. With just a name and a cell phone number, financial capital can be liquified and mobilized. The exorbitant commission charged by these service providers is offset by the ease of transaction.
The post-colonial economies of countries such as the Philippines and India—where Balaguer and Thirukode come from, respectively—suffer from a phenomenon called brain drain. Lack of financial, emotional, intellectual, and political opportunities to sustain dignified forms of life/study drive capable people to seek a livelihood elsewhere. This desired elsewhere is often the seat of a colonial power that mined the developing economy in the first place, relegating it to the state of dysfunction that provokes migratory exodus.
South/Eastern citizens-in-flight aspire to mobility through coveted working or travel visas. Once the visa is acquired, the kinship cells they are attached to—often large extended families linked as much by blood as by ties of personal debt/gratitude—may pin their fate to the fortunes of the visa holder. A culture of remittance emerges, built on the notion of duty and generosity. Those who are afforded the privilege of mobility support those who are excluded from capital access. A common final goal is family reunification, or the multiplication of visas for others to participate in the imperfect system of abundance and expand their physical and class mobility, which could rarely happen in their places of origin because empire predates European colonialism. (They did not invent the exercise of power, they merely hold some of it at the moment.) This is the basic framework of the post-colonial dream state, which by no means guarantees a happy ending. There are nuances of struggle in this story line, it mustn't be romanticized as a springboard for critical deliverance."
1st Quarter 2022
Conference No. 7 with Mirjam Dalire
29 Mar 2022, 8PM PHT / 13:00 CET
SLI by Jerwin Darag
Mirjam Dalire is a multidisciplinary artist based in Negros Oriental, Philippines. She works with photography, internet-based installation, video, sound, and painting. Mirjam often uses virtual spaces as a staging point for confrontations with her immediate environment, employing satire and humor in her process.
29 Mar 2022, 8PM PHT / 13:00 CET
SLI by Jerwin Darag
Mirjam Dalire is a multidisciplinary artist based in Negros Oriental, Philippines. She works with photography, internet-based installation, video, sound, and painting. Mirjam often uses virtual spaces as a staging point for confrontations with her immediate environment, employing satire and humor in her process.
4th Quarter 2021
Conference No. 6 with Guri Simone Øveraas
9 Dec 2021, 8PM PHT / 13:00 CET
SLI by Jerwin Darag
Guri Simone Øveraas (b. 1990) was born and raised in Tråante/Trondheim. She has a Bachelor from Trondheim Academy of fine art and studied her masters at Tromsø Academy of fine art where she graduated spring 2020.
Through performance and sculptural works, she tells stories from her fantasy and reality, where she often mixes the absurd with the familiar. Her works evolves around identity and often explores the feeling being alienated and/or the feeling of being part of something. The audience are often invited to take part in her works.
9 Dec 2021, 8PM PHT / 13:00 CET
SLI by Jerwin Darag
Guri Simone Øveraas (b. 1990) was born and raised in Tråante/Trondheim. She has a Bachelor from Trondheim Academy of fine art and studied her masters at Tromsø Academy of fine art where she graduated spring 2020.
Through performance and sculptural works, she tells stories from her fantasy and reality, where she often mixes the absurd with the familiar. Her works evolves around identity and often explores the feeling being alienated and/or the feeling of being part of something. The audience are often invited to take part in her works.
3rd Quarter 2021
Conference No. 1 with Jord Earving Gadingan
7 Aug 2021, 7PM PHT / 13:00 CET
SLI by John Lester Go Dig and Jun Sevilla
My niches are grassroot systems and I have been exploring for 8 years now working with governments, academicians, non-profits and communities. I've organized several community projects and 'social responses' in Batangas province [since 2016] and currently working with social innovations on health systems in Quezon. I'm privileged to non-formally learn and experience community development and ecological principles by asking countless questions.
—
Jord Earving Gadingan is a community worker, researcher and writer for Sa Ngalan ng Lawa, an initiative exploring "other sciences" on environment work.
Conference No. 2 with Czar Kristoff
10 Aug 2021, 9PM PHT / 15:00 CET
SLI by Renato Soriano Jr. and Jun Sevilla
CZAR KRISTOFF (Camarines Sur, Capricorn Earth Snake) is an artist, educator, and publisher, interested in (re)construction of space and memory, through concepts of nesting and temporary architecture, for (pedagogical) occupation, using cottage industry publishing—blueprints, xerox, and other low-fidelity printing methods—as his current media of interest. He has exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Showroom MAMA Rotterdam, Jogja National Museum, C3 Artspace Melbourne, Bangkok Arts and Culture Center, De Appel Amsterdam, Dansehallerne Copenhagen and Vargas Museum Manila. Kristoff is affiliated with Hardworking Goodlooking, a publishing and design hauz interested in decolonization, horror vacui and tropical diaspora. He runs Temporary UnReLearning (URL) Academy, a parallel school with no permanent address, interested in de-centering art and cultural production in the Philippines.
Conference No. 3
with Dir. Bernardo Rafaelito R. Alejandro IV, CESO IV, MNSA
and Mark Cashean Timbal
12 Aug 2021, 3PM PHT / 9:00 CET
SLI by Ms. Ana Bellia Ico
Dir. Bernardo Rafaelito R. Alejandro IV, CESO IV, MNSA is the current Lead of Operations Service and is the concurrent head of the Rehabilitation and Recovery Service of the Office Civil Defense Department of National Defense. He has extensive experience in the field of Disaster Risk Reduction and Management or DRRM, specifically in setting and developing policies and implementing strategies and mechanisms on disaster risk reduction, preparedness, rescue, relief and rehabilitation. His technical expertise in Incident Command System (ICS) , crisis management, and civil-military coordination, have allowed him to efficiently manage the major high impact events and natural disasters during his ten-year term as the Regional Director of Bicol Region and in his subsequent leadership roles in the bureau. He is a Career Executive Service Officer with a Rank of CESO IV, and a Naval Reservist with a Rank of Lieutenant Commander.
—
Mark Cashean E. Timbal is the spokesperson of the Office of Civil Defense (OCD) and concurrent spokesperson for the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC). He is also the Officer-in-Charge of OCD’s Public Affairs Office.
As an educator, he has more than 10 years-worth of experience and is currently a parttime faculty member of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP)’ College of Communication. He is an alumnus of PUP, one of the nine (9) Magna Cum Laude graduates of Batch 2005, with the degree of bachelor’s in journalism. He has taken units of Master’s educational management and public administration. He has completed various and international training programs on disaster risk reduction and management, defense, communications, and public service. He has been in government service for almost 15 years.
As a government spokesperson, he attends to various media engagements to represent NDRRMC and OCD. He facilitates press briefings to report information to the public during various occasions and emergencies. He responds to public queries and requests through interviews and program appearances/guesting’s during both peace times and emergency operations.
He advises the NDRRMC Executive Director and Civil Defense Administrator on the treatment and handling of the various issues involving the agency and related programs and advocacies. He is also a member of the various task forces who are responsible for strategic communications, public information, and risk communications.
7 Aug 2021, 7PM PHT / 13:00 CET
SLI by John Lester Go Dig and Jun Sevilla
My niches are grassroot systems and I have been exploring for 8 years now working with governments, academicians, non-profits and communities. I've organized several community projects and 'social responses' in Batangas province [since 2016] and currently working with social innovations on health systems in Quezon. I'm privileged to non-formally learn and experience community development and ecological principles by asking countless questions.
—
Jord Earving Gadingan is a community worker, researcher and writer for Sa Ngalan ng Lawa, an initiative exploring "other sciences" on environment work.
Conference No. 2 with Czar Kristoff
10 Aug 2021, 9PM PHT / 15:00 CET
SLI by Renato Soriano Jr. and Jun Sevilla
CZAR KRISTOFF (Camarines Sur, Capricorn Earth Snake) is an artist, educator, and publisher, interested in (re)construction of space and memory, through concepts of nesting and temporary architecture, for (pedagogical) occupation, using cottage industry publishing—blueprints, xerox, and other low-fidelity printing methods—as his current media of interest. He has exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Showroom MAMA Rotterdam, Jogja National Museum, C3 Artspace Melbourne, Bangkok Arts and Culture Center, De Appel Amsterdam, Dansehallerne Copenhagen and Vargas Museum Manila. Kristoff is affiliated with Hardworking Goodlooking, a publishing and design hauz interested in decolonization, horror vacui and tropical diaspora. He runs Temporary UnReLearning (URL) Academy, a parallel school with no permanent address, interested in de-centering art and cultural production in the Philippines.
Conference No. 3
with Dir. Bernardo Rafaelito R. Alejandro IV, CESO IV, MNSA
and Mark Cashean Timbal
12 Aug 2021, 3PM PHT / 9:00 CET
SLI by Ms. Ana Bellia Ico
Dir. Bernardo Rafaelito R. Alejandro IV, CESO IV, MNSA is the current Lead of Operations Service and is the concurrent head of the Rehabilitation and Recovery Service of the Office Civil Defense Department of National Defense. He has extensive experience in the field of Disaster Risk Reduction and Management or DRRM, specifically in setting and developing policies and implementing strategies and mechanisms on disaster risk reduction, preparedness, rescue, relief and rehabilitation. His technical expertise in Incident Command System (ICS) , crisis management, and civil-military coordination, have allowed him to efficiently manage the major high impact events and natural disasters during his ten-year term as the Regional Director of Bicol Region and in his subsequent leadership roles in the bureau. He is a Career Executive Service Officer with a Rank of CESO IV, and a Naval Reservist with a Rank of Lieutenant Commander.
—
Mark Cashean E. Timbal is the spokesperson of the Office of Civil Defense (OCD) and concurrent spokesperson for the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC). He is also the Officer-in-Charge of OCD’s Public Affairs Office.
As an educator, he has more than 10 years-worth of experience and is currently a parttime faculty member of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP)’ College of Communication. He is an alumnus of PUP, one of the nine (9) Magna Cum Laude graduates of Batch 2005, with the degree of bachelor’s in journalism. He has taken units of Master’s educational management and public administration. He has completed various and international training programs on disaster risk reduction and management, defense, communications, and public service. He has been in government service for almost 15 years.
As a government spokesperson, he attends to various media engagements to represent NDRRMC and OCD. He facilitates press briefings to report information to the public during various occasions and emergencies. He responds to public queries and requests through interviews and program appearances/guesting’s during both peace times and emergency operations.
He advises the NDRRMC Executive Director and Civil Defense Administrator on the treatment and handling of the various issues involving the agency and related programs and advocacies. He is also a member of the various task forces who are responsible for strategic communications, public information, and risk communications.
Conference No. 4 with Abigael Castro
14 Aug 2021, 4PM PHT / 10:00 CET
SLI by Jerwin Darag
I am a Museum Researcher at the National Museum of the Philippines under its Geology and Paleontology Division since 2009. My usual day at work alternates between collections management and laboratory works. Pre-COVID19, I was also doing guided tours for our museum viewers and field works around the country.
I finished my bachelor’s degree in Biology at the Baguio campus of the University of the Philippines. Currently, trying to finish my master’s thesis at the National Institute of Geological Sciences in UP Diliman.
On my spare time, I enjoy binge watching tv series and movies, reading mindless Wattpad stories and, back when times were much nicer, travelling.
Conference No. 5 with Isola Tong
17 Aug 2021, 11AM PHT / 5:00 CET
SLI by Maan Tugade
Isola Tong (b. 1987, Manila) is an artist and architect engaging Filipina shamanic and autochthonous transgender imagination through performance, installation, print, painting and moving image to disrupt the hegemony of western understandings of nature and identity. Her interests include:
Ecological Drag as a practice of embodying precolonial indigenous genealogy of gender-variant women in the context of a world at the brink of ecological collapse to discover new pathways to self-determination.
Vernacular Fiction as a practice of articulating and centering contemporaneous figurations of marginality and transness in decolonializing patriarchal and racialized narratives.
Feral Poetry as a practice of conveying the interconnectivity of biological agents in subaltern and transfeminist terms.
Encounters with the environment, locality and objectification informs her fictive speculations and feral poetics as modes of dissidence from normative notions through queer vernacularity.
14 Aug 2021, 4PM PHT / 10:00 CET
SLI by Jerwin Darag
I am a Museum Researcher at the National Museum of the Philippines under its Geology and Paleontology Division since 2009. My usual day at work alternates between collections management and laboratory works. Pre-COVID19, I was also doing guided tours for our museum viewers and field works around the country.
I finished my bachelor’s degree in Biology at the Baguio campus of the University of the Philippines. Currently, trying to finish my master’s thesis at the National Institute of Geological Sciences in UP Diliman.
On my spare time, I enjoy binge watching tv series and movies, reading mindless Wattpad stories and, back when times were much nicer, travelling.
Conference No. 5 with Isola Tong
17 Aug 2021, 11AM PHT / 5:00 CET
SLI by Maan Tugade
Isola Tong (b. 1987, Manila) is an artist and architect engaging Filipina shamanic and autochthonous transgender imagination through performance, installation, print, painting and moving image to disrupt the hegemony of western understandings of nature and identity. Her interests include:
Ecological Drag as a practice of embodying precolonial indigenous genealogy of gender-variant women in the context of a world at the brink of ecological collapse to discover new pathways to self-determination.
Vernacular Fiction as a practice of articulating and centering contemporaneous figurations of marginality and transness in decolonializing patriarchal and racialized narratives.
Feral Poetry as a practice of conveying the interconnectivity of biological agents in subaltern and transfeminist terms.
Encounters with the environment, locality and objectification informs her fictive speculations and feral poetics as modes of dissidence from normative notions through queer vernacularity.
