Year: 2025
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On Walter Benjamin’s weak messianic power
In Walter Benjamin’s writing, “weak messianic power” (schwache messianische Kraft) names a fragile, non-sovereign capacity that belongs to the present to redeem the past—not by fulfilling history’s promises in a grand, theological sense, but by interrupting the dominant narrative of progress and rescuing suppressed or defeated moments from oblivion. The phrase appears most explicitly in…
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Jacinto’s ‘Mutya’ in Liwanag at Dilim
Emilio Jacinto (Emilio Dizon Jacinto)—also known in the Katipunan as Pinkian and Dimas-Ilaw—wrote Liwanag at Dilim out of the same revolutionary world that made him, the “Brains of the Katipunan”. This is how Nicanor G. Tiongson’s sketches his life as a poet in the CCP Encyclopedia: Tondo-born essayist and poet (15 December 1875–6 April 1899)…
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Baroque Churches in the Philippines
The development of the Baroque in the Philippines is most clearly observed in masonry churches, where European architectural forms were adapted to local materials, labor, and environmental conditions. The term “Baroque,” associated etymologically with the Portuguese barroco (irregular pearl), was later used by art historians to describe artistic production marked by dynamic composition and intensified…
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Sikatuna as viewer’s surrogate in Luna’s Pacto de Sangre
I reread Filomeno Aguilar’s essay on the pacto de sangre, and it reminded me how often Luna’s painting is still described as a straightforward image of uneven relations between Spaniards and indigenous leaders. Even the encyclopedia article by Santiago Pilar echoes this. That reading treats the canvas as if it were meant to function like…
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Juan Luna’s French Orientalist Connection
For a long time, art historians have speculated about Juan Luna’s larger network of artists in Paris, including the extent to which he moved within the academic orbit of Jean-Léon Gérôme, the towering figure of French Orientalism. Gérôme’s pedagogical influence has often been inferred through stylistic parallels and early biographical testimony, yet documentary anchors have…
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The afterlives of Rizal’s A orillas del Pasig
A orillas del Pasig circulated in late nineteenth-century Manila as music sung in drawing rooms and printed as sheet music. Its most familiar version, A orillas del Pasig: Danza Filipina para Canto y Piano, features lyrics credited to José Rizal and music composed by his Ateneo Municipal classmate Blas Echegoyen. Hardly anyone remembers that the…
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Coulisse ala Philippine
I was reminded of a term I’ve seen before but never fully grasped during an art history lecture by Andrew Moisey on staffage in photography: the coulisse (pronounced koo-LEES). Developed by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin in 17th-century Rome, it refers to the dark “wing” of trees or architecture placed on one side of a…
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Juan Luna in Japan
Juan Luna’s brief but productive stay in Japan in 1896 is not always discussed is scholarship even if the works he produced during those visits forms some of the most visually compelling episodes of his late career. After returning to Manila in 1894, and following a turbulent period amid the growing revolutionary climate, Luna traveled…
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Mga Bilanggong Birhen (1977), an Amorsolo-Pastoral in Film
Mga Bilanggong Birhen (1977) is set on a Visayan hacienda during the early years of American colonial administration. The film follows the Sagrada family—Felipa, Juan, Doña Sagrada, and the daughters Celina and Milagros—within a household that retains social structures established during the late Spanish period. Throughout the film, the architecture of the ancestral home, its…
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Rosa Rosal, 97
Rosa Rosal, who died today at 97, was a leading actress of the postwar studio era and one of the Philippines’ most prominent humanitarian workers. Born Florence Lansang Danon on October 16, 1928, in Manila, she was discovered by chance after the war and made her screen debut in Fort Santiago (1946) for the Nolasco…
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Indios Bravos, 1888–1889
Between April 28 and May 16, 1888, during his continental journey across the United States, and again during the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, Rizal confronted two dramatically different representations of Indigenous Americans: one as commercial stereotype, the other as dignified performers. These encounters shaped what would become Indios Bravos, the fraternity founded by Rizal…
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José Rizal’s visit to the Javanese Village at the 1889 Paris Exposition
rizal, gamelan, debussy, java, expo, 1889, dunia melayu
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Ang Mutya ng Epiro: Isang Maagímat na Pagbása sa Florante at Laura ni Balagtas at Marca Demonio ni Amorsolo
Disyembre 13, 2025, Sabado 3-4 PM Unibersidad ng Pilipinas-Diliman Tatalakayin ng presentasyong ito ang dalawang anyo ng alegorikong substitusyon. Una, ang pagpapalit ng Pilipinas bilang Epiro sa Florante at Laura ni Balagtas. Dito inilalarawan ang isang kalis bilang sandata ng kabutihan at sagisag ng banal na katarungan. Ikalawa, ang Kris Joloano na muling lumitaw sa imahen ni San Miguel Arkanghel sa Noli…
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The Teacher Who Became a Mountain: Fernando Poe Jr.’s Asedillo (1971)
When Asedillo premiered in 1971, Ferdinand Marcos was tightening his grip on the republic, and the air in Manila was thick with student marches, labor strikes, and the metallic aftertaste of tear gas. Celso Ad. Castillo’s film—produced by and starring Fernando Poe Jr.—could have been mistaken for another action vehicle designed to confirm FPJ’s legend…
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Pustaha
The name pustaha is borrowed from the Sanskrit word pustaka meaning “book” or “manuscript.” The pustaha of the Batak in North Sumatra often contained dark and secret knowledge passed down through ritual specialists (datu). Among its most striking tales are those of black magic, where the text describes methods to destroy enemies through gruesome rites.…
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Vertebra in Vial
Questions persist about Rizal’s vertebra. Among them, why was it preserved? The oft-repeated claim that it was precisely where the bullet struck is unproven and, in the end, immaterial, since part of his brain was also preserved. The more curious matter is why these fragments, the vertebra and the brain, were placed in viales de…
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José Rizal’s Drawings of Anting-Anting
Proving yet again that in any field of inquiry Rizal emerges as the ubiquitous scholar, this photograph from the Dean C. Worcester Collection at the Newberry Library (Ayer Philippine Photographs) shows a drawing of objects he reportedly discovered on a hill near Dapitan. The inscription reads: “Anillo de oro con un rubí y una medallita,…
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Amulets of historical imagination
In 2021 after numerous museum visits in Southeast Asia, I began reflecting on what collections revealed and concealed about history. The objects that most profoundly shifted my thinking were not the canonical works of art but the agimat, talismans seized under colonial regimes and now dispersed across museums. Just last week (September 21, 2025), while…
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The Agimat as Matrix: Conceptualizing Islamic Rematriation
In an early twentieth-century catalogue from the Field Museum in Chicago, a Qur’an-inscribed agimat—a talismanic belt from Mindanao—is marked “difficult to obtain.” Composed of cloth, baroque pearls, plant matter, and sacred text, the object was classified as an ethnographic specimen, stripped of its cosmological function and ritual charge. This paper uses that object as a…
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La Bulaqueña: What We Know About The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Latest Attraction
The following notes draw from the wealth of information shared by scholars, collectors, archival researchers, and art history networks following the loan of La Bulaqueña (1895) to the Louvre Abu Dhabi (June 2025). It brings together insights from literature, oral histories, institutional records, and recent findings that have come to light in the wake of…
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Irineo Miranda’s Ethnographic Portrait of Nina Rasul and the Philippine Bangsamoro
My article, “Irineo Miranda’s Ethnographic Portrait of Nina Rasul and the Philippine Bangsamoro,” is now out in the latest issue of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints (Vol. 73, No. 1, pp. 3–43). This piece revisits Miranda’s 20th-century illustrations through the lens of colonial ethnography, visual anthropology, and Bangsamoro history, tracing how his portrait of…
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Suzi Ferrer
Herbert Johnson MuseumJan 25, 2025–June 8, 2025Ithaca, NY In her artist statement for Portrait in Six Dimensions (1973), Suzi Ferrer (1940–2006) described the installation as emerging from her “continuing concern with the relation of the individual to society,” specifically addressing “female stereotypes and role-playing, or perhaps, what this society expects of women, and how they…
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Book Review of Enigmatic Objects for Southeast Asian Studies journal
In Enigmatic Objects: Notes Towards a History of the Museum in the Philippines (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2023), National Artist for Literature Resil B. Mojares offers a thoughtful and absorbing meditation on the origins of collecting in the Philippines. Organized like a cabinet of curiosities, the book assembles stories of portraits, phrenological skulls, coconut-shell…
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Pearls in Jean Fouquet’s Melun Madonna
Painted ca. 1452–58 as the right wing of the Melun Diptych, Madonna and Child Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim by Jean Fouquet constitutes a singular contribution to the visual culture of the French court. Executed in oil on panel, the painting presents a Marian figure suspended between celestial abstraction and courtly specificity. Seated on a…
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The Queen’s Cosmopolitical Portrait
Imagine standing before a grand portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, resplendent in a gown adorned with pearls, her hand resting confidently on a globe. Behind her, two seascapes depict the English navy’s triumph over the Spanish Armada. This is the Armada Portrait, painted around 1588 to commemorate England’s naval victory and to project the queen’s…
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The Place of Shells: Making and Unmaking Archipelagic Southeast Asia
Summary This essay traces how vernacular spatial logics in Southeast Asia—expressed through myths, maritime movement, and ritual orientations—shaped understandings of sovereignty before the imposition of colonial borders. Drawing on the figure of the pearl as a model of layered accretion, it explores how societies in the Philippine archipelago organized space through concentric and relational forms…
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Goya’s Fight with Cudgels
Two men, isolated in a barren landscape, beat each other with heavy sticks. There’s no clear reason, no visible audience, and—crucially—no way out. Their legs vanish below the frame, long assumed to be submerged in mud. Later photographs taken before the painting’s transfer to canvas suggest they may have been standing in tall grass. Either…
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Felix Hidalgo, Un Rio
The enigmatic painter Felix Resureccion Hidalgo captures a river veiled in the quiet of early evening. The viewer’s gaze glides over the water’s surface, mirroring the way our eyes perceive the fading light by fluidly dissolving into darkness. The glow trembles in the foreground, absorbed by the landscape rather than resisted, as if the deepening…
Geronimo Cristobal 