The idea of inheritance often carries with it the idea of precedence, and the ways of proceeding with it. The sequence of time in inheritance is chronological and causal. While the means of critiquing it recalls what came before, time is now treated another way. The notion of causality and acceleration has changed, with the period of identifying “pre-“ as in-anticipation to calculated probabilities of future as opposed to the sense of “post-“ as what happens next.
Critical inheritance in the works of Filipino artists Robert Gutierrez, Miguel Aquilizan and Derek Tumala goes past the image-tropes of Philippine history. In the field of myth and simultaneous time, their works speak about performing the principles of what is yet to arrive. These artists present a peculiar trajectory on being an artist whose lineage is entangled in the history of Philippine cultural life. Amidst the montage of postcolonial vestiges and the mystic/animistic fabric that cloak the daily Filipino philosophy, Gutierrez, Aquilizan and Tumala unpack a particular language of superposition that goes beyond the valorization of Philippine iconography and materiality that subsisted for decades. What they propose is a fresh vision that reconstructs the landscape disentangled – one whose language is a refraction and a prism. The reverse ethnographic is stellar, and the tropics are multi-colored.
Sidd Perez
Photo © Charles Roussel & Ocula.
