Solo exhibition featuring the works of Pin Calacal
When in the early weeks of March, the Philippine government placed its capital region under community quarantine, few foresaw the extent of the disturbance it would create. Mobility in one of the world’s densest regions ground to a halt, its notoriously busy streets and sidewalks eerily emptied. Unable to leave, most people turned their attention inward, towards home, chores, and everyday routines. Public working personas were displaced to the private realm, as numerous online meetings allowed glimpses of intimate spaces. Others grappled with isolation from family and friends. Even as today’s technology afforded interactions to continue in digital spheres, it also served to highlight the shrinking of the physical. The intimacy of touch, the camaraderie of social interactions, had been transmuted into vectors of disease. A kind of paralysis was imposed on us, by threats both virological and political, and one could not simply opt to flee.
It is from this bleak environment that Pin Calacal’s forms are fashioned. Supine bodies float over geologic formations as if displaced from the very earth, or seemingly in the act of separating from themselves. Landscapes are endowed with a discomforting starkness. In the time of pandemic, Calacal talks of lingering anxiety borne by the psyche and the body. Of an unsettlement leading to disjuncture that she tries to capture. She mentions days lived like a waking dream, hazy and indistinct, and a pervasive sensation of lightness and floating–– as if of souls drifting, unmoored from their anchors.
According to anthropologist Michael Tan1, the Filipino concept of the “wandering soul” is rooted in the precolonial. Leaving the body during sleep, its excursions were regarded as dangerous, a potential cause of medical affliction (even of death), should it fail to return. But this errancy of the soul could also be interpreted as an admonition against deviancy, of exclusion from the social body. This particular misalignment was also regarded as contagious (nakahahawa), surfacing the tensions between separation and incorporation. Hence, in Filipino notions of disjuncture and displacement in relation to the soul, we find the intertwining of corporeal, social, and psychical malaise.
Months into the lockdown, the spread of the disease seems unrelenting, the end far from sight. We seem to be hinging ever closer to darker horizons. Meanwhile, Calacal’s landscapes are infused with interiority– private meanderings and anxieties evoked by current social and medical crises. But while the presented images are acutely personal, illustrating dissonance with the self, the artistic intention is to allow discomfiting experiences to resonate, which is to say, to reflect in order to reinforce or reverberate. It seeks expression in recognizing similar and shared interiorities. In so doing, the personal turns outward, turns to affirm and effect inclusion and kinship. Indeed, solidarity may well be what we need to lead us beyond these ever more disquieting nights.
[1] Tan, Michael. Revisiting Usog, Pasma, Kulam. UP Press, 2009.
