Curatorial Statement

“The Truthfulness Lies in the Process, Not the Outcome” Using Artistic Practices to Further Truth-Telling and Memorialization in the Philippines

“…14 WWWWW's foregrounding of 'narrative documentation' rather than 'narrative change-making' is rooted in diverging positions regarding the political and social responsibility of art among project leads, with some advocating that the artwork not be beholden to any agenda and others insisting that art cannot be separate from the struggles surrounding its genesis. The primary focus is therefore on the complexity and volatility of representing, bearing witness to, and memorializing experiences of violence and resistance, and art's potential in this regard, notably in terms of deconstructing barriers that inhibit truth-listening by creating newmaterial and immaterial-lieux de mémoire that acknowledge this complexity and volatility (Castro 2023). In this section, I zoom in on two building blocks of this approach.…”

“…7 Because of the acknowledgment that the experiences of these women (who come from six different sites in the Philippines, including Bangsamoro) do not lend themselves to 'easy storytelling', and that 'theirs are not stories that translate in straightforward ways from raw experiences to narrative form, 8 the research component was complemented with an artistic project. This component starts from an exploration of the limitations of different kinds of documentation, the difficulty of navigating vast amounts of documentation, the 'diminished gaze' of mainstream media, and deeply rooted prejudices against women, indigenous groups, and Islamic cultures (Castro 2023). The creation of spaces for articulating lived violence in new ways therefore became a crucial ambition, addressed through the WWWWW project that constituted a space where narratives of violence are constructed and circulated through visual artefacts and interventions (Ibid.).…”

“…9 The WWWWW exhibition encompassed a physical show as well as an online virtual exhibition, both developed by the participating women who collaborated with an artwork developer and a curator, seeking to move beyond traditional representations of violence. 10 Starting from this position, the curatorial team developed a practice that revolved around the recovery, reconstruction, and problematization of images to create new lieux de mémoire, as well as around artistic and traditional practices' broader potential in terms of accounting for complex forms of violence (Castro 2023). This approach steered the interventions in each of the six localities, which constituted the organizing principle for the exhibition.…”