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On Saturday, Jose Tence Ruiz will be flying to Italy to begin mounting ‘Shoal’ his 9.2 x 3 x 2.6m-installation referencing BSS Sierra Madre, which is one third of “Tie A String Around The World,” the exhibit curated by Dr. Patrick Flores that will mark the return of the Philippines to the Venice Biennale after 51 years of absence.
“It’s going to occupy the pavilion like an elephant in the room,” he says to reporters at the press conference held at the Department of Foreign Affairs this week. “It is imposing its presence. That is my hope.”
The other two exhibits that comprise the Pavilion are Manny Montelibano’s 3-channel film A Dashed State, which will be shown in another room, and forming a full circle and the pivot by which the entire exhibit hangs, is the screening of Manuel Conde’s Gengis Khan, the movie which the Philippines put on display at the Venice Film Festival in 1952.
Somehow, all the elements did tie themselves together, and right on time too, for the comeback of the Philippines at the world’s oldest and most prestigious art exhibition.
And a lot of them have come to tangent with the issues that the exhibit intends to put forward — the volatile meanings of country, border, territory, nation, patrimony, freedom, nature, limit, community.
Ruiz, for instance, references the 7 years he spent as an OFW in Singapore to make ‘Shoal.’ “We had to use materials that we can take apart because this is Venice, everything is transported by water,” he says.
His experience moving apartments in the Tiger City provided him with the answer: Perforated angle bar to build Shoal, a representation of the Sierra Madre, that for him best represents the Filipino.
“Look, a country is taking its claim in the circumstance of an old derelict. Pinoy na Pinoy, di ba? Astig. Hindi tayo ang pinaka-powerful, and we’d probably lose in minutes. The Sierra Madre is a slum fortress but it is your space. That is our space. Ganun tayo, and to me, that’s what I love about it.”
Interestingly enough, the idea of ‘Shoal’ had been simmering in his mind even before the Venice Biennale came to fore. He had originally planned it for a project with Silverlens, but when Dr. Flores approached him and mentioned the idea of the sea, “it bumps into something that’s been simmering in my mind.”
He was in Quebec, Canada, participating in a performance art festival when he got the news: “We’re in.” They had roughly seven months to prepare but “really we have to be prepared in 3 months after we got the notification because mag-shi-ship ka eh.”
Ruiz sought help from fellow artist Jeremy Guiab, cool guy of Xbeziter, who built ‘Shoal’ for 3 and ½ weeks. “Then he said, I needed to take it out already because it was occupying his entire studio. So we took it out and I rebuilt it in my living room. We needed to learn the timing, [so that we could set it up at the Venice.]”
According to Ruiz, with a three-man team, four 9-10 hour days are needed to set-up all the metal parts and another 8-10 days for spires, cladding and texturing with velvet. “Sagad talaga oras namin sa Venice,” he says.
Which isn’t so much the case for Bacolod-based artist Manny Montelibano, who will only need to make sure the wiring, sound, and other technicalities are in order when he arrives in Venice in late April.
A Dashed State is the second piece of contemporary art on display at the Biennale. It will be shown in one of the rooms with 5.1 sound, “so viewers will really be inside the movie,” Manny says.
As important as the three-channel video are the many weird things he heard during the week-long filming — the Chinese songs on the radio, the “English broadcast about Beijing art as I was facing the West Philippine Sea,” he laughs.
Originally, the idea for A Dashed State was to go to Pagasa island, “but there are security issues, there are no commercial flights. To get to the island, it will take four days on a boat and then another four days to come back,” Manny says. “It’s really funny because as a Filipino, it’s so hard to our own country.”
But the port area proved to be a good subject matter, “because it is the take-off point to the disputed islands and at the same time, people in that area don’t realize how important or valuable their place is. Imagine, you are the gateway of the Kalayaan group of islands and the rest of Southeast Asia,” he exclaims.
This is what he hopes audiences will feel as they stand inside the room where his film is shown. “Be inside the work,” he encourages. “It is experiential.”
Tie A String Around the World will be on exhibit at Venice Biennale until November 22. It will then be put on display at the UP Vargas Museum.
Portions of Shoal by Jose Tence Ruiz
From A Dashed State by Manny Montelibano
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