Magandang hapon.
I’d like to congratulate Isola for this exciting new work. Felicitations to you and your collaborators, especially Aly, and thank you, OICA for supporting this important project.
What I find most instructive in Isola’s work is her encounter with the vernacular queer category of the bayot, a Visayan figure of gender diversity. Contemporary studies of the figure, such as Cebuano Francis Luis Torres’s deconstruction of their genealogy, places the bayot, marked as cisgender gay, as supplement to the heteropatriarchy of the post-colonial nation state imagined contrapuntally from a Visayan archipelagic vision, especially during the period of the Commonwealth.
Isola’s concept of a “bayotic refugia” not only rescues the bayot from their abject status within colonial and nationalist governmentality, nor does it merely relegate the bayot to a natural condition. With an intuition of the bayotic as a most encompassing lifeworld always already emancipated from the human as both sovereign subject and savage creature, the bayot becomes a life form, and as a genus of living itself, they can only embrace humanity, in its sovereign and savage instances, as aspect of a larger and more fundamental category of vitality striving to contend with the material history of the colonial metropolis and within the specific scope of this project, the national state university. The bayotic persuades the human to be engaged from within the terms of trans ecological intimacy and through these relations between species, become embedded in planetary movements reclaiming what could finally be earth. The installation “Lawalawa: sa buhol ng di tiyak” points to a poetics and a pedagogy of what we could call a bayotic community to come.
A comparative survey of Austronesian languages including Binisaya and Bikolnon would teach us that the spider is signified as “lawa” or “lawalawa” and the masterpiece of the filaments emanating from their spinnerets also dwells within the same semantic and semiotic arrangement: “lawalawa” queerly opening itself either to diminution (as itsy bitsiness) or mimicry (through longleggedness) by way of repetition: “lawalawa.” Lawalawa. And yet the scale of this particular installation metonymises what could be monstrous on the one hand but also what might be the amplitude of the refuge on the other, whether one survives or surrenders to the pharmakon, by turns venom and antivenom. Isola’s particular predication on the indeterminacy of the weaving and the web itself, especially at the moment of entanglement, converses with Eva Hayward’s trans reading of Louis Bourgeois’s arachnosexual sculptures and her queer amorous reverie on Nina Katchadourian’s sutured spiderwebs, and yet also goes beyond the gender and the desire of such spiderwomen reciprocities by proposing a methodology of making premised on the not yet of transness despite being broken and wounded from all manner and modality of violence on earth.
In the Hawai’ian language, “lawalawa” is no longer a spider nor a silken web, and yet arachnopoesis persists in three senses linking craftwork and creation as well as equipment and engineer, artefact and architect: 1) to bind what could be blown away by the wind; 2) to stretch disparate ends of a thing and fasten them to foreclose breakage; 3) to seal the strength of an object by securing its tensions from end to end. What the poetic means as a mode of creating is demonstrated here by means of an ineffractable encirclement that queerly nullifies the false friendship between the tarantulan and the lacustrine, paradoxically at that moment when the spider and the lake disappear but are nonetheless foregrounded by their procedures of emergence, allowing every other thing of life to crawl upon the earth but also be contained in it.
Today, we can only be delighted by Isola’s lessons on the singularity and the solidarity found in the allegory of creativity nestled between the spider and her spindle. Indeed here in Diliman, the bayotic refugia can only be once again intimated through this installation, and this afternoon, also amplified by the sonic art of the extremely talented Aly Cabral.
Again, felicitations, Isola!
Daghang salamat.