Hanging School / School Suspended

“Kabit at Sabit” was conceived as a one-day multi-site exhibition across the Philippine archipelago, continuing our critical exploration of methods of curating as a potential to generate sustainable local art ecologies. We found the open call approach best suited the curatorial aspiration for inter-dependency, for collective survival.

We disseminated the call on various social media platforms with one simple guideline: “Present an artwork/project on the exterior of your house or studio, on streets, or at other outdoor venues with easy access for the public on May 11, 2019.” Taking place three days before the Philippine general election, during which public spaces and social media sites were bombarded with political campaigns, “Kabit at Sabit” also explored the expanded social sphere by playing with multiple layers of viewing experiences, both physical and virtual. We asked the participants to post photographs or live-stream videos of their work simultaneously on their social media sites with the hashtag #kabitatsabit. The participation was open to anyone in the field of art and culture; 32 individuals and groups responded to our call and joined the project.

Kabit is a Filipino word for being attached, connected, or fixed, and Sabit is a Filipino word that roughly translates as to hang or hanging, implying the temporariness and transformability of the material presence. The words also have layers of reference to social relationships. Thus, the exhibition “Kabit at Sabit” expressed our attempt to play with materials and with social conditions of vulnerability, insecurity, and unpredictability.

“Kabit at Sabit” was inspired by the local, communal tradition of the annual Pahiyas festival in the small farming town of Lucban in Quezon, Philippines, where the residents deck or adorn the facades of their houses with their bountiful harvest. Aside from natural produce, the locals also display foods, crafts, and anything that reflects the resident’s life such as vinyl records, teddy bear collections, books or bikes. The festival’s origin dates to the pre-Spanish, 15th-century pagan ritual of offering harvests to the gods and goddesses of the land. It was converted into a Catholic religious celebration by introducing a patron saint for farmers.

Through modifications, transformations, and shifts throughout time, Pahiyas now transcends its former identity as a doctrinal tradition imposed by the colonizer and has become a cultural practice that brings the community together by sharing creativity, skills, knowledge, food, time, humor, and care for each other.

The curator and artist, the late Raymundo Albano, described Pahiyas as an example of an authentic form of installation art in the Philippines. In the text “Installation: A Case for Hangings”, he discusses installation “as a case to get through our authentic selves” in connection to the Filipino local cultural and natural environments. “It may be that our innate sense of space is not a static perception of flatness but an experience of mobility, performance, body-participation, physical relation at its most cohesive form.”

The creatively participatory, experiential, and spatial qualities of the local festival destabilize the modern Western perspective and allow multiple perspectives to roam around slowly and gently interact with each other, engendering worlds. The artistic form of installation, enabling unconventional choices of mediums and methods of production, was also instrumental in regaining the immediacy of artistic expressions within the spaces of everyday life.

“Kabit at Sabit” aspired to critique the centrality of an exhibition by problematizing the concepts of location, duration, and public. The exhibition unfolded simultaneously in multiple geographical locations, loosely connected by the thematic signal of “Kabit at Sabit.”

The exhibition also critiqued the idea of curatorial selection. There was no curatorial intervention in the artists’ plans. Propelled by an intention to tweak the familiar tensions of the one curating and the ones curated, the exhibition was designed to operate on differences and a multiplicity of ideas, and on pluralisms of artistic approaches without engaging in a curatorial habit of creating one unified voice to narrate and stabilize a particular way of “reading” the artworks. The exhibition explored a way to keep artworks in direct attachment with the context of the production site.

1.
CIRCULATION, PARTICIPATION, AND INCLUSION

With the participation of 32 artists and groups in different locations, we believe the project successfully decentralizes the viewing experiences. However, in retrospect, the dependency on social media to disseminate the open invitations limited the project’s reach to the existing networks of direct and indirect friends, to within the strong ties of relationships. All the participants who responded to our call came from the art and culture field, which might be complicit in creating the perception of art as a hermetic discourse.

In future, how can we disseminate the call to a wider range of people in different disciplines, generations, and beliefs, including our neighbors? First, we must imagine the potential of traditional ways of disseminating information, such as printed materials, local broadcasting, and oral communication. For this, we aim to get the help of the participants of the previous “Kabit at Sabit.” This might also help to open communication routes to counter the force of disinformation prevailing in our society.

2.
HYBRIDITY OF THE EXHIBITION

Social media was used as a parallel exhibition site to explore the expanded social sphere engendered through constant switches between online and offline spaces. Videos and photographs showing the preparation stage, the work, and the performance played a role in archiving and collating individual experiences and opened up shared social realities. Long-distance participations were linked using hashtags. Accidental crossings with #kabitatsabit posts on social networks in a nonlinear order prompted other artists’ spontaneous participation. Without relying on a command structure, the entirety of the exhibition manifested as unfixed and transformative formations of parasites, rather than an organizing host. The hybridity triggered intimate, deceptive, sometimes inspirational, and provocative encounters and generates stories and energies with, around, or through families, neighbors, communities, and strangers.

3.
INTERACTIONS

What can we further share? Because each artist simultaneously exhibited their works in their own spaces, it was impossible for the participants or spectators to visit all the artworks over the course of the project. As our energy was also concentrated on the production and presentation of the exhibitions, we feel that we failed to facilitate more active interactions and engagements among the participants. By exchanging and learning from ideas and real experiences with each other, “Kabit at Sabit” may start functioning as a learning platform that enables the participants to share the energy to prepare, present, reflect on and plan for the next. The continuous process of interactions will create a shared imagination, foster care for each other, and generate a sense of co-ownership of “Kabit at Sabit.” It may be more accurate to imagine “Kabit at Sabit” as a space for mutual learning and for practicing collective survival.