Art in Open Spaces: A Case for Closer Encounters

In 2021, indoor spaces in the Philippines were regulated through constantly changing protocols. After months of policing how bodies gather, the government seemed to relax restrictions by the end of the year as candidates for the 2022 national elections started holding rallies outdoors. Supporters, mobilised in public spaces, are photographed as a mass of colours linked with certain political parties. Assembling becomes an elaborate choreography, a political capacity to organise movement and affective states. As scenes that thrive in scale or crowding, they conjure the visual spectacle of space seemingly unified by colour.

Toym Imao, ‘Barikada’, 2021, repurposed furniture, bamboo, paint, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of UP Diliman Office for Initiatives in Culture and the Arts (UPD-OICA). Photo by Pol Torrente.

It is interesting how similar concerns of scale, visuality, and urgency can animate the production of art in public spaces. There have been ambitions to push against state narratives through the readability of images dispersed in open grounds — but I have also wondered how public art might operate more nebulously through tactility, a capacity to re-orient the body by movement and by touch. And so, while there were many initiatives to make art public in 2021 to early 2022, I focus here on the installative, the site-specific, and construction as impetus for collaboration.

The publicity received by Toym Imao’s ‘Barikada’ (2021) attests to the readability of iconography. Building on the history of its site, the University of the Philippines Diliman campus, it straddles commemoration and commentary: a towering construction of chairs — painted with a deep, protesting red — recalls the barricade built by students in 1971 to bar the entry of police. Imao’s installation assumed renewed urgency, with the government’s abrogation of an accord that protects the campus from state forces. When public space is contested ground, there is the expectation for art to stage conflict, if not launch a direct rebuttal. Yet, the strategy of obstruction through the materiality of a barricade might inadvertently turn the work into another kind of monument, one regarded at a distance, in a relation of reverence that skirts a more vulnerable ambiguity.

Isola Tong, ‘Ark’, 2021, steel structure, lightbox, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Vargas Museum.

Elsewhere in the same campus, in the gardens of the UP Vargas Museum, artist Isola Tong has fashioned a black rectangular structure with chain link mesh. Compact, cage-like, ‘Ark’ (2021) bids spectators to enter and view an image of the artist photographed as giraffe-woman. Part of the exhibition ‘Cast But One Shadow,’ the work forwards an ecological consciousness, as it speaks to the translocation of animals from Kenya, and their eventual extinction, under the Marcos administration’s Calauit Safari project in 1976. The curator Carlos Quijon, Jr. was explaining all these to me as I entered the structure with the light waning at sundown — but my attention had fractured under the anxiety of being shut in, and I felt the nagging itch to scurry out and seek the safety of open space. At the same time, I was pulled to the soft intensity of the light box, the radiance of the woman-animal body engaging mine in an unflinching stare. Here, viewing sculpture in the round defers to the rupturing of space: a lovely, troubling intimacy.

Leeroy New, ‘Mebuyan’s Colony’, 2022, steel, wood, bamboo, plastic bottle discards, agricultural systems, 7 x 25m. Photos by Alvin Zafra.

Considering public art’s potential to institute a gathering place, an arena of relations, I wonder how gathering might move beyond the comfortable and the convivial, and instead, like Tong’s work, render our bodily horizons more porous, more unsettled, more readily attentive to the presence and agencies of others. Two large-scale installations that have produced spaces to gather were Leeroy New’s ‘Mebuyan’s Colony’ (2022) outside Ateneo Art Gallery and James Clar’s ‘I Can’t Tell You What I Don’t Know, Only That I Don’t Know’ (2022) outside Ayala Museum. Despite New’s collaborative ambitions, what strikes me upon walking through its interior is a palpable incongruity between site and concept. The monumental doubles as greenhouse and hideaway; yet, here, the architecture of a bridge — inspired by a mythological crossing — seems yet unable to fulfil itself within the protected spaces of a university. If the architecture was instead situated in a location with greater disjuncture, an in-between place occupied by divergent publics, how might the work harness the affective disturbance inherent in a "crossing"?

James Clar, with the award-winning giant parol team from Santa Lucia in San Fernando Pampanga, ‘I Can’t Tell You What I Don’t Know, Only That I Don’t Know’, 2022, Santa Lucia giant parol truck, modified light system, 20 x 10 x 40ft. Image courtesy of Silverlens.

Clar’s work, for its part, relies on a questionable gesture of dislocation. What could have been a way to connect with the community — the giant parol (lantern) team from Santa Lucia in Pampanga who assiduously crafted the elaborate light system — is foiled by the linear presentation. Spectators, gathered through scheduled light-and-sound performances, are given little motivation to engage performers labouring to rotate the cylinders at the back. In this strict, almost hierarchical,

delineation of bodies, what tends to transpire is a brief consumption of spectacle, rather than an intimate contemplation of its lifeworld. Another sound installation that combines technology and traditional arts is the collaborative installation ‘Atang’ (2022) at the Diliman campus. With ceramic instruments arranged at different positions, it prompts audiences to experience sound as slowly unfolding atmosphere. The spectacular is dodged in favour of the meditative.

Craft and construction are modes through which these projects have materialised. In the work of Alwin Reamillo, tactility and assemblage open up ways for a public to gather. Reamillo was granted a residency at Orange Project in Bacolod where he worked with the community of artists and held workshops on object-making. ‘Pagtawag sang Kasanag’ (2021), the resulting piece, is built around a floatation base of tires and bamboo frames. On these, participants have attached turbines made from plastic bottles, disks, and chimes. The tactility of object-making yields what Reamillo regards as vernacular creativity. As the process unfolds moments of sociability, design defers to a playful DIY form over which the artist-author had little control. The work, which floated across a lagoon in Bacolod, serves as a prelude to a larger structure. A boat to be launched in the public art festival

‘Art in the Lake’ gathers objects crafted by Bacolod artists. It might alsobe a gesture of gathering thicker lines of contact, as Reamillo ferriesthe idea from Bacolod to engage residents in Tanauan, Batangas.

Toym Imao, Dayang Yraola, Rita Gudiño, Mitch Shivers, Cocoy Lumbao, ‘Atang’ (detail), 2022, ceramic instruments, bamboo, steel scaffoldings, wood, paint, fabric, electric motors, microphones, roof panels, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of UP Diliman Office for Initiatives in Culture and the Arts (UPD-OICA). Photo by Nel Crisostomo.

When I was writing this article, Reamillo was coordinating the festival with local authorities and communities. Engagement — at its simplest, connection — entails the hard, nerve-racking work of contending with alert levels, and the possibility of putting collaborators in danger. Perhaps this speaks to the task and burden of public art today. When the state wields monumentality and spectacle, how might public art enliven our senses through intimacy and tactility — considering, of course, the hopes and risks that proximity brings? These pandemic years have trained our bodies to seek safety. Perhaps slowly, with much more care than before, art in public spaces can re-train us to make contact, rupture our spaces, and re-orient our bodies to the promise and precarity of encounters.