Baguio Graffiti - Stray Cats
Baguio Graffiti - Stray Cats
"Santiago Bose has always been known in Philippine contemporary art as an innovator and a bricoleur who explored the shifting archipelago of his culture. It is a culture shaped by the domination of empire in its various guises in history as well as the creative struggles against empire which generated a lively makeshift strategy of resisting exhaustion. Bose thought of himself as a drifter whose oeuvre and life made up a diary full of incident, diverse engagement, and the incessant search for the “weapons of the weak.” The artist’s gear largely consisted of mixed-media, installation, and performance art projects that cut up and suture, mix and remix, photocopy and juxtapose, steal and replace found objects, pictures from the archives, garden statues, animist imagery, and even the traces of the sun’s rays which pierce marks into his works. Though he often crossed borders, Bose found his center in Baguio, a mountain city in northern Philippines which was an American hill station in the early twentieth century. Surrounded by the living traditions of indigenous peoples, faced with the encroachments of globalization, and taking on the role of a gregarious firebrand of local artists, Bose--hunting and gathering, slashing and burning in economies that subsist on performative parodies--nurtured an agile and ludic imagination committed to the imperative of change and its highly hybrid, fantastic, and resolute dispositions." –Patrick Flores White Wine Press is a series of texts, one hundred being the goal, as an open project that seeks to wander a world. We are looking simply for those voices that have an urgency of saying. The artists are free to write about any subject, preferably about something outside the overwhelmingly present frames of their own work, or at least to come at the same in tangential fashion. In other words: state an interest.(White Wine Press / Cu4tro Galeria de Arte, 2006)