Araw na Nakapitapita (The Day Most Eagerly Awaited)

Mark Salvatus

Mark Salvatus’ That Day Most Eagerly Awaited presents and explores the home as a thriving ecology. The COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed our homes into spaces of shelter and confinement simultaneously shielding yet isolating us from the outside world. The work and its multiple components of video, archival materials, mural, and drawings largely take from a short story the artist’s grandfather published in a Philippine magazine in 1993 about a hermit and a golden bull that lived in Mount Banahaw in Quezon province in Luzon island. From within the installation, you see the artist activating his home by constructing a view of the world from within its confines. He references his family’s archive to build a network of associations that span local history, folklore, communal yearnings and shared desires. Fusing his grandfather’s writings of fiction with stories of the Philippine revolution he remakes the home as a space that is timeless and without bounds. Through interwoven texts and materials, the work presents an encompassing view of a world remade through fiction and fantasy wherein locality is central and the folk becomes universal. This speaks to an agency forged by anticipation and a desire for transformation.

Mark Salvatus (b. 1980). I studied Advertising at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila and started as an artist as a street artist. Since 2006, I call my overall artistic project as “Salvage Projects” working across various disciplines and media. Basing it on the word ‘salvage’ or to save or rescue which is also the meaning of my surname, I try to build direct and indirect engagements using objects, photography, archives, videos, installations, participatory projects, and platform organizing that present different outcomes of energies and experiences. My preoccupations are based on constant movements and travels – coming from the countryside to the city and elsewhere, addressing and building new imaginations of the contemporary land – urban and rural, the glocal migrant and the vernacular historiographies. I am interested in communication and miscommunication as a form and as a structure and not as a process. A form that is unstable, vulnerable and precarious as a fluid form and not fixed or established. A practice that deals a lot with collecting, repetition and series based on my lived experiences and its relationship to the world.

Tessa Maria Guazon is a curator and educator based in Manila. She developed the proposal for the Southeast Asia Neighborhood Network during the ICI workshopin Manila. This is a research project with women artists Alma Quinto and Nathalie Dagmang with pedagogy as a central goal. She is part of the interlocutor program for the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial organized by the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. She is the coordinator for Exhibitions and Curatorial Analysis for the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. Her current project for the network considers curation and curating as collectivist practices. In 2019, she launched Curating in Local Contexts workshops with colleagues Louise Salas and Mayumi Hirano. The workshops aim to understand how curation is practiced in the Philippines, within specific conditions of possibilities and constraints.

Notes for Tomorrow is a traveling exhibition organized and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI) and initiated by Frances Wu Giarratano, Jordan Jones, Becky Nahom, Renaud Proch, and Monica Terrero. The exhibition was made possible with the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, VIA Art Fund and ICI’s Board of Trustees and International Forum.
 

We are on Treaty 1 Territory. Plug In ICA is located on the territories of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Plug In ICA extends our heartfelt gratitude to our generous donors, valued members, and dedicated volunteers. We acknowledge the sustaining support of our Director’s Circle. You all make a difference.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council, the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. We could not operate without their continued financial investment and lobbying efforts.

Plug In ICA relies on community support to remain free and accessible to all, and enable us to continue to present excellent programs. Please consider becoming a member of Plug In ICA and a donor at https://plugin.org/support or by contacting Erin at erin@plugin.org.

For more information on public programming and exhibitions contact Allison Yearwood at allison@plugin.org.

For general information, please contact: info@plugin.org or call 1.204.942.1043