Neo-Urban Plan update: Pananaw 7

Art and its Public/s | Broad topic: Art of/degrees of Engagement
by Lisa Ito

Locally and globally, this triennium from 2007 to 2009 was anything but serene and stable—with the unfolding downfall of the global economic oligarchy and monopoly capital, the rising threat of climate change, and intermittent disturbances throughout this archipelago of unrest.

Inescapably, such an untenable situation has left its mark—whether overtly or implicitly—in the ways that visual artists have responded to the calls of creativity. Among the impressions that the numerous exhibitions and artist initiatives from 2007-2009 have left, it is the reminder that Philippine art remains a potent response to socially-situated realities: a journey of dismantling and discarding, constructing and reconstructing, seeking the invisible and reinventing the visible.

This article attempts to thread through a quad of four disparate art projects exploring intersections between art and social reality. Situated from 2007 to 2009 in various spaces (from state cultural institutions to commercial galleries, as well as “non-art” sites of struggle from the rural areas right to the distended bowels of Metropolitan Manila), the exhibitions refresh reflections on the role of the artist in society and demonstrate how art, in activist-scholar Lucy Lippard's words, acts a “powerful partner to the didactic statement, speaking its own language...and sneaking subversively into interstices where didacticism and rhetoric can't pass.”

Confronting Urbanities, Embracing Ecologies

While the HOC workshops are situated as a response to various intersectional traumas (personal and political, racial and economic), another recent art initiative focuses on engaging facets of urbanity: the Neo-Urban Planner online project by University of Santo Tomas-based cross-disciplinary artist Mark Salvatus, as part of his residency program for Green Papaya.

Channelling the Internet and blogging as technological tools for engagement, Salvatus issued a call early this year for public submissions to reimagine and reinvent the Philippine's urban centers and their motley landscapes of crime and grime. This, of course, poses quite a conceptual challenge for a territory plagued by unprecedented environmental degradation (the World Health Organization counted Manila among the five dirtiest cities in terms of air pollution worldwide in 2005), extreme congestion and rising poverty (20 million urban poor Filipinos in slum communities).

Salvatus' brainchild is perhaps a personal response to the growth of urban sprawl since the 1970s –fuelled by growing dislocation from the countryside yet compounded by the dearth of urban employment opportunities. With both manufacturing and agriculture down, a situation ensues where the state of urbanization seen is not necessarily contiguous to development or national industrialization. As cofounder of Pilipinas Street Plan artists community, Salvatus' previous engagements in bringing art out into the metropolis (through graffiti and other street art forms) now takes a reverse tack and tries to bring the city into art space this time around.

The project is an exercise in changing the landscape of the metropolis and an interesting counterpoint to the practices of the infamous Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), the government agency which chalked up a lengthy list of controversies in pursuing the metropolitan transformations it conceptualized (lightning demolitions of urban poor communities, displacements of street vendors, construction of an elevated U-turn overpass, the Valentine's Day massacre of trees along Katipunan Avenue, urban 'facelifts' that painted the city in ubiquitous Sanrio pink and blue). Salvatus asks the public re-imagine their selves in the place of the MMDA, identified with huge dispensatory and administrative mandate over the metropolitan landscape, and to do as they wish.

Interestingly, the reference to the MMDA in the Neo-Urban Planner project finds resonance in Fallen Map, where Anading's fallen pieces of gaily-colored rubble recall the swaths of “MMDA art” (a “beautification” program aiming to literally whitewash and overlay the works of vandals-- including graffiti and revolutionary or progressive slogans--with gay geometrical designs) but then break that allusion down into a crumbling edifice. Far from pursuing the path of MMDA art, Neo-Urban Planner directs improvement and creativity towards community-centric advancement rather than expanding state-sponsored aberrations. Speaking from the point of view as a citizen-artist, Salvatus asks: What is our role in changing the city?

Following the online responses to the artist's call for neo-urban planners were ideas that were green, clean, people-friendly and doable–no pink overpasses and community demolitions this time around. Ranging from backyard tips to city-wide plans, these belied a concern for upholding the ecological, cultural, and economical: a (finally) clean Pasig River, comprehensive mass transportation and railway system, urban planning around architectural heritage, contingency plans for the perenially-submerged Camanava (Caloocan-Malabon-Navotas,

-Valenzuela) district, canopied streets, judicious use of concrete, and small-scale adoption of renewable energy technologies. In the process of soliciting suggestions, Salvatus later on engaged in a collaborative community-based art workshop with children from the Parola compound in Binondo, Manila, using clay art to model their aspirations for the city where they were born.