2021 is the quincentennial of European contact with the islands which the succeeding European explorers would eventually name the Philippines. The operative word here is “contact” which pertains to the surface of the skin. This work is to situate a tracing of one’s skin through the lens of queer desire that has been upended and rendered a scourge by Catholic instruction brought by the colonizers.
Agony/Ecstasy is an animation piece of disparate moments intimated by the Spanish Baroque flourishes. [Click here: Agony/Ecstasy animation by Jose Ardivilla.] Baroque is not simply an epoch or an aesthetic style but an interlocking system of domination and control that seeks to slither itself into whichever colony it lands on. Thus, latching itself to the minds and bodies of its subjected natives. The title “Agony/Ecstasy” is how the artist views the statues of the Catholic Saints that have dotted the cultural landscape creating territories of reverence. The artist views that the faces and the bodies of such saints flit between serenity to the ecstatic elations of apotheosis of spiritual heights even at the pains of martyrdom via torture and death. The body of the faithful is now subject to both scrutiny and control of the colonizer’s prevailing religion. Baroque is dominion via body politics demonstrating intense dramas of the bodies to the colonized.
This operation relegating the body as a site for control is not just by Spanish colonizers but inflicted as well by other Western colonizers in Southeast Asia. Though the details may be different, the aims are similar: subject the body and reshape it into what is “decent.” “Decency” is a colonial mindset as to being an acceptable approximation of but never really becoming the colonizer. Colonized bodies are fraught and must be pacified. One of its fraught measures is how many Southeast Asian cultures show “queer” inflections. Such bodily displays of affection and identity are deemed transgressive by the West for they believe such queerness has no place for they deem it unhealthy and a mark of savagery. Thus justifying further violence via the instructions as well as the cartographic violence of the overlapping institutions left behind in their wake (such as the legal system and education) to curtail such aberrant “queer” bodies.
For many colonial experience under Spain, the body is the locus of difference and assertion. The Catholic religion has sundered the body as a segment vehicle for sin. This art project is a short animation work showcasing a weaving of local queer narratives of culture vis a vis the Catholic art imagery whose saints, believers, sinners are depicted only with either agony or ecstasy – and yet one can arguably not tell the difference. This is to situate a counter-utterance by many queer people in our cultures whose articulations not only persist but have imbricated themselves in local religious rituals. This enactment is an operation of presence, of not being silenced. This animation/illustration piece is a play on the Spanish Baroque in the Philippines which is often associated in aesthetic – that is the overwrought drama of the body as displays of fervent faith via the tremulous flesh; but, also, the Spanish Baroque as an ideology of submission, of instigating and entrenching violence amidst want through spectacle.
Queering From the Island of “I”
One issue that I contend with and am wary of is that this exhibition of the queer artists/queer art of Southeast Asia must be “relatable” to each other. While we can see many overlapping points, the focus on connection and ease of this connection is the politics of accommodation. To be queer is not to be accommodated, but to be clearly marked as different, to be marked as dangerous. The problem with equivocation, this is an attempt of making queerness as overarching in a Pan Asian framework. Pan-Asianism is a centrality of privileged voices emanating from the local intelligentsia elite in their perceived shared realities of and self-fashioned desires for the cosmopolitanism. This is to situate queerness as foisted by a singular narrative lived in and emanating from the West. Cosmopolitanism is seeking the unitary among the diversity. This is not queer. The frontier where the borderlands position the outside and the inside is the queer.
What is the cosmopolitan in the archipelagic? Queerness is of several islands. Islands never have concrete shorelines. Queerness is that constant nebulousness. It is not really unformed. It is not malformed. Queerness is not set and that makes it dangerous in a reality addicted to cartographic violence of insistence of categorization and of sameness. Queerness, to me, then is to fracture from this equivocation, because queerness is of varying emergence, varying erasures, varying visibility in the many cultures of Southeast Asia. Queerness is not listening to the point of view of the privilege, for, yes, even among the LGBTQIA, privileges are still present and operationalized.
Queerness is then of many utterances that do not accommodate clear cut, easy categorization that has to be easily connected with each other. Queerness then is not just a political act, but an aesthetic of disruption, disconnection via assertions…plural; an aesthetic of cacophony. Queerness is of many bodies, of many states of brokenness in those bodies. Queerness is of many islands confronted by unrelenting waves that erode the islands. Queerness is knowing that agony and ecstasy are the same things going in different directions. Queerness is not making light, but making loud of the mistakes and slippages that disconnect us to make us think of the politics of segmentation which the label “queer” is about the margins and screaming from the margins. Screaming is not music to accommodate and to placate. Screaming is, after all, an inflection, a violent piercing one, associated with queerness.