Enacting the Possible

April 2021, Manila

Social media furore over the red-tagging of community pantries is whirring as I write this. The Philippines is at month 13 of fumbling state-initiated and confabulated lockdown strictures masquerading as health measures that inevitably constrict not just mobility, but solidarity. In just a week, 350 makeshift tables and stacked boxes have sprung up from Luzon through Mindanao, unevenly but all spontaneously drawing food, protective gear, even books to share from sites of want as well as from excess. The anarcho-leftist call to "give what you can, take what you need" (already a fairly benign social media buzz phrase by 2015) has seen itself spun in all endearing as well as abominable directions. Pantry volunteers are having to answer to police about their presumably shady ideological relations. That a people beaten down by the pandemic-enabled state still cares enough to give even when they ache so deeply makes Rodrigo Duterte's pundits incredulous. The creeping suspicion is that the whiff of communality sends up a middle finger to the breadcrumbs government deigns to call social amelioration.

Farmers are pitching in sacks of sweet potatoes and fisherfolk are crating in tilapia. A grandmother hands over a bag of fried bakes she's made to sell in order to feed her family for the day. Trike drivers and street sweepers come in to repack takeaway portions to pick up the pace at pantry queues. A market vendor throws in a whole bag of dry noodles to piggyback on a purchase that turns out to be a donation rolling out. Yet the fumbling response from Malacañan is laughable demonization of mutual aid—waving it off as a sheer recruitment ploy of communists, making the non-case for social distancing, patronizingly casting the under/unemployed and hungry as so incorrigibly barbaric that only the crack of a whip can keep them from devouring each other.

This is the backdrop of a running conversation I'm having with a performance maker who, like many empath artists, waxes despondently about their work figuring in any genuinely meaningful way amidst the landscape of contingency and dire need that Covid-19 has wrought. Spectres of global disbelief fail to wash when ominous black orbs, solitary candles and digimemorials pop and buzz across your media feed. As we near the 1 million case mark in the Philippines, ever more millions are kept from work and robbed of the capacity to keep themselves alive.

One might argue that too much still of what pierces through the ether of academe and critical inquiry are enactments that are odious, grating and often numbingly sensate in maximalist registers. The theatricality is often a bid to break past the din. But with the non-descript gesture of taking from the pittance one has to help scrape against the lack of many more variably deprived, the inertia lifts. Cold paralysis clamped upon mind, body and soul relents just patently enough to jumpstart forgotten rhythms of care knocked out of you with every cycle of blaring breaking story: a newly minted death of a quarantine violator in the hands of burly security, muted though no less tragic tales of reporters and activists shot and taken from homes before daybreak, droning recitations of emptied numbers—fatalities, actives, recoveries—the granular number crunching and droid-toned reportage stripping the sense-scape of hope.

That is precisely where I wager that bodily propelling oneself from stasis makes for a performance of agency, a will to strike out albeit tenuous and an easy target for quelling. When an otherwise under-the-radar artist-citizen ferried a box of rations and propped it up on a rickety shelf on Maginhawa Street, Quezon City on 14 April, the action itself was unceremonious. It could very well have gone the way of so many other trivialities that stream past many of us barely keeping it together. But that isn't how it has played out, and now a still virulently debated web of subsequent enactments has become layered, gesture upon gesture, bulking up shared portion upon other piledup minute portions now strewn across the islands, currying some modicum possibility of escape. The affectively spent and immobilized will likely need to keep wrestling to imagine release and reversal. Gloom still looms on the wings of this sordid performance of wilful killing and mournful passings. But the bodies, minds and spirits that choose to move from doing nothing, thinking gravely and cowering in disbelief might indeed just spill over to the remaking of many other spaces. Here the nanopotentialities of assembly forge traversals that keep the still-living afloat long enough to breathe past collective torpor.

Resbak zine #5, inner page 1.

Resbak zine #5, inner page 2.

Pen Prestado poster design for RESBAK exhibit, Cubao X, 2019.

Anakpawis peasant month mob, October 2021. Image courtesy of SAKA.

Anakpawis peasant month mob, October 2021. Image courtesy of SAKA.

Community kitchen preparation, October 2021. Image courtesy of SAKA.

Tulong Anakpawis Community Kitchen, May 2021. Image courtesy of SAKA.

Kitchen Kalasag, June 2021. Image courtesy of SAKA.

Sea mob, March 2020. Image courtesy of SAKA.

Sea mob, March 2020. Image courtesy of SAKA.

Anakpawis mural. Image courtesy of SAKA.