The country referred to as the Philippines consists of 7,641 islands with 19 nationally recognized languages. In 1521, Ferdinand Magellan and his crew sighted the eastern Filipino island of Samar on a voyage that made them the first Europeans to circumnavigate the world and arrive in Asia via the Pacific Ocean. It was not until after the Spanish-American War in 1898 that Spanish rule over The Philippines would subside for similar rule under the U.S. government, which lasted until the end of WWII.
This is a truncated telling of history and a very Westernized one at that. One may wonder what aspects of the Philippines exist outside colonial interests, and, more importantly, who lives there?
Cian Dayrit, “Various Validated After Thoughts,” 2015, intermedia on unclaimed diplomas mounted on wood. Courtesy of the Jam Acuzar
This question gets interrogated repeatedly in the provocative Liberties Were Taken, the career-spanning (and first in the U.S.) exhibition by Filipino artist and activist Cian Dayrit, currently on view at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum. Given the scope of this show, Dayrit traverses several mediums, including painting, tapestry, drawing, and light-based installation. Dayrit’s central obsessions, however, point back to a practice called counter cartography, which challenges official, state-sanctioned maps in order to prioritize alternative ways of understanding a region and its inhabitants.
One of Dayrit’s standout pieces, an embroidery collaboratively made with the Filipino artist Henricus, titled entanglements with extractive embellishments (eeee!), makes visual a key disagreement over the country’s Kaliwa Dam. For the Filipino government, this dam alleviates water scarcity in urban Manila, the country’s capital and largest metropolitan area. However, by juxtaposing the engineering cartography with, as stated in the piece’s exhibition label, “cultural features of the Indigenous [Dumagot] land and the social and environmental impacts that would be the consequences of the dam’s construction” Dayrit prods at the tension between the state (itself a manifestation of Western influence) and the relations to land that predate colonization.
Cian Dayrit, “Veins of the Superstructure,” 2023, embroidery on fabric. Courtesy of the artist
Near entanglements with extractive embellishments (eeee!) is another tapestry described as a “mind-map,” titled Veins of a Super-structure. This piece moves counter cartography away from physical geography and more toward the abstract interventions made by Western countries on Filipino culture and art. Veins of a Super-structure bears a distant likeliness to the diagrams of Mark Lombardi. One connective branch reads “Western modernity” – “Conceptual Art + the Avant-Garde” – “Reorienting Nationhood and Identity Amidst Globalization and Neoliberal Restructuring.” This tension between the artistic traditions of the West and Filipino culture presents clear stakes for Dayrit who, at his core, cannot separate his artistry from his activism.
For this reason, one of the most admirable aspects of Liberties Were Taken is that Dayrit is decentralized in his own show. One room focuses on drawings that came out of cartography workshops with people described as magasaka (peasant class of farmers, fishermen, and Indigenous minorities). In these workshops, he taught map-making approaches that center communal narratives of the land, emphasizing trauma, massacres, everyday life, ancestral histories, and aspirations for the future.
In this same gallery, two large installation pieces face each other: State of Plantocracy and Dam Nation. Both are from a larger series titled The Austere Enclave, and comment on the systems of dams and banana plantations threaded throughout the Philippines. State of Plantocracy uses neon lights to spell out the phrase “MARKET AS ECOSYSTEM + LIFE COMMODITY.” Seeing this installation is how I came to understand an important stance in Dayrit’s counter-cartography practice: the logic of capitalism is so prioritized in the world that it makes any other way of existing impossible.
Cian Dayrit, “Rare Colorized Image of Institutionalized Assimilation,” 2018, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Teng Ponco
These pieces are parallel to Dayrit’s early works, which depict the introduction of Western, capitalist values through education. The teaching of English and rudimentary economic concepts (“supply” and “demand”) were also paramount to how the Filipino state came to be.
Dayrit brings us back to the present with a counter-cartographic oil-on-wood painting titled usok aspalto putik kemikal. In the piece, Dayrit focuses on political tensions in the Calabarzon region, the country’s main industrial center for automobile manufacturing and producing electronics. The painting commemorates the “Bloody Sunday” of March 7, 2021, when Philippine National Police and Army forces raided and arbitrarily killed nine activists and arrested six more. On May 17 and 18, 2024, the weekend before this show was installed, the International People’s Tribunal on War Crimes in the Philippines found current Filipino President Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr., former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, and current U.S. President Joe Biden guilty of humanitarian crimes against the Filipino people.
Cian Dayrit, “Sundago Solidarity Quilt,” 2018-2019, fabric quilt. Courtesy of the artist
The final room of the show contains the Sandugo Solidarity Quilt, of which Dayrit was one of over 25 artists to contribute to, and was commissioned by the SANDUGO alliance of Moro and Indigenous Peoples of Self-Determination in the Philippines. Like me, you may find your eye immediately drawn to the corner opposite of where you enter, where one panel reads “Resist the Fascist Attacks of the US-Duterte Regime.”
Liberties Were Taken is on view at The Blaffer Art Museum through August 18, 2024.
