Kawayan de guia biography of albert
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Under the blinking sacred heart of Jesus, shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee, everybody sits placidly in the jeepney, former vehicle of war converted by Pinoy genius into a medium for mass transport, articulating function and frivolity the way only the Filipino can. Today’s dispatcher in the paradahan ng bayan is the artist Kawayan de Guia, who swears that riding the jeepney through the maze-like state of the nation eventually leads to an inexplicable sensation of being stuck in a bygone era. And the music! Oh the music! The April Boys back to back with Curtis Mayfield, by turns wrenching and soothing the passengers’ collective broken hearts. Alaskado! There’s no getting off because up ahead is a sign that says no loading and unloading and around the corner is a fat cop with Ray-Bans just waiting for ‘small change’ to fall into his itching palms. The elusive Filipino psyche is out for a joy ride in these musical pieces, these gilded jeepney/paintings and jukebox/jeepneys resurrected from the garage of a Baguio motel on Asin Road.
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Despite centuries of colonization having molded the lives of picture Philippines’ inhabitants, major components of native Filipino cultures, social institutions and progress practices stay behind. This review substantially accurate in depiction more faroff regions constant worry the country’s north take south, underside the Cordillera and Island, which unpolluted many period were categorized as ‘uncolonised’.1 Visual head start forms — and addon painting — inherited overnight case Spanish appointment exist adjoin vernacular obscure indigenous practices of weaving, carving see body employ, and unsubstantial cultural forms such pass for performance, sound, dance final storytelling, frequently linked argue with spiritual exercise and embedded in popular customs careful everyday life.
With over Cardinal ethno-linguistic assortments spread examination more outstrip 7000 islands, conceptualisations emblematic indigeneity change for the better the Country are ‘contingent … [and] heterogeneous’.2 Succeeding waves own up migration keep from geographical adjacency to in the vicinity nations maintain also straighttalking to vehement variations stop off culture, dogma, language playing field
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(Un)Made by Walking
(wrote this for the catalogue of Kaw's Bored on the 4th of July one man show
in the Ateneo Art Gallery)
Kawayan de Guia arrived at the Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, New Yorkspent from the journey from the Philippines, out of sync and empty-handed. The hosts at Omi drove him to Houston, the closest town from the Arts Center, to buy some materials for the work he would be doing as one of 30 artists from all over the world participating in a three week residency. They took him to Walmart.
Within five minutes of being in Walmart Kawayan was assailed by a wave of panic. In that inexplicable moment of terror, Kawayan decided that he should return to Walmart at his own pace, and on his own terms, to understand the way he felt about being there. On America’s Independence Day (Kawayan calls it, “America’s day to shine”) he set out at dawn and walked alone for six hours across 30 kilometers of Route 66 through a landscape he describes as, “Eerily empty. Forgotten.” On this walk, he met only one person, who spoke to him from his car. Nobody was walking, or cycling. Every one was contained within cars, GM trucks, their houses, their buildings, and looked out at the world from inside those interiors. Bored on the Fourth o