JET PASCUA
A Portrait of the Filipino as an Artist*
by Carina Evangelista
A camera with a bird’s eye view records a man resolutely stamping knee-high snow with his feet to spell out the word “SAKLOLO.” The mind that conjured this video art is Jet Pascua’s. Titled Lost in Translation, there are multiple possibilities for what is lost.
The word itself. “Saklolo”–Filipino for “Help!”–is rooted in the Spanish “Soccorro.” One wonders how the original, with the vibrante alveolar múltiple pronunciation of the double R, conceded to two L’s, considering Filipinos can easily pronounce “rumaragasa (raging).” Could “saklolo” have formed on the retroflex fricative tongues of Chinese merchant migrants to the Philippines, to whom the letter R curls softly into L, making distinguishing between the two difficult?
The man himself. Pascua left his homeland for Norway in 2003, among the many waves of diasporic Filipinos the world over since Henry the Black (Enrique of Malacca), Ferdinand Magellan’s slave, believed to have hailed from the archipelago that would later be colonized as the Philippines and recognized as the very first person to circumnavigate the world. To be “kayumanggi” (the brown skin tone deriving from the Malay “kayu manis” or “sweet wood” for the spice from cinnamon bark) is to be “sun-kissed” from evolutionary adaptation to the intense sunlight in the equatorial region. Imagine how lost such a man might feel, suddenly transplanted to a country that’s closer to the North Pole than the equator?
The place itself. Is it the man that’s lost in translation or the place? The cinnamon body that plods through the snow feels the meaning of “saklolo” viscerally. It is the white snow that is foreign to the body. The below-zero arctic weather is a physical embodiment of the isolation rooted in profound rootlessness in a new country where none of the alveolar or fricative sounds in its language registers with meaning, much less comfort, to the new transplant.
Losses in multiple layers notwithstanding, the man plods. Crying for help in a language foreign to the land he adopted and inscribed in snow that would eventually collapse unto itself and evaporate is tragicomic. Pascua is the laugh-cry emoji plowing through winter wonderland. Humor is defiantly Filipino.
If Filipinos will or warp survival–of colonization, natural disasters, socioeconomic privation, political dynasties–by laughter, Pascua wills and wraps his diasporic psyche in art. Emigrating as an adult, wrestling with one’s identity upon finding himself living among people not his own becomes pronounced. He charts the tougher path. Refusing the tropes of the fiesta, the lechon, or the tinikling with which to feel or declare, “I’m Filipino,” he chooses to “problematize what it means to be Filipino.” One might survive by laughing. One can thrive by interrogating. Pascua weaves the philosophy of the examined life into his art and work.
To create Alikabok (Dust), Pascua hacked the portrait of the hero, Andres Bonifacio, into a wall with an ax, reenacting the hero’s brutal murder by machete upon Emilio Aguinaldo’s instruction. This led to Aguinaldo’s ascendance to power as the first president of the Philippines. To Pascua, “Bonifacio’s murder is the foundation of the Philippine government, and this crime is the dust that Filipinos still breathe.” Pascua’s violent action painting is the figuration of tragedy and treason among the ranks of Filipino revolutionaries, even before the yoke of colonialism from Spain could be shaken off. It bears noting that Bonifacio’s executioner, Lazaro Macapagal, is the ancestor of the 9th and 14th presidents of the Philippines.
Alikabok (Dust), a version of which is in the collection of the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, has had various iterations over the years. Each time Pascua re-performs the hacking, the narrative of the birth of the nation, nearly Biblical in parallelism with Aguinaldo's Cain killing Bonifacio's Abel, is ritualized. Categorically refusing to be complicit in historical revisionism or amnesia, the dust and shards from the hacked wall pay deeper homage to the martyrdom than Bonifacio’s face on the Philippine five-peso coin (0.76 NOK) ever could.
Moving to another country as an adult is akin to birthing oneself. Pascua arrived in Norway with training in Painting at the University of the Philippines. The following degrees in fine arts came in succession: BFA from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, MFA from the Bergen Art Academy, and PhD from the Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art. Both his artistic practice and academic research have revolved around how “abandonment of one’s country conditions the Filipino mind,” dissecting and digesting the ravages of dislocation.
These academic achievements belie Pascua’s beginnings in Manila, practically as a school dropout. Barely into his teenhood, the panganay (firstborn) was suddenly parent to his younger siblings when their parents moved to California, where they were held hostage for a decade with thwarted attempts to achieve immigrant status. The obligation to be the responsible “adult” at age fourteen would be capped years later with brief homelessness in Manila. He repaid the kindness of Presiding Justice of the Court of Appeals, Nathanael De Pano Jr., who took him in by offering to be his driver. It was the judge’s wife, Aurora, who encouraged him to return to school.
Pascua carved a name for himself over the years while raising three Filipino Sami sons whose mother is from a reindeer-herding family. Now a single father, he juggles preparing meals for his sons while ensuring their self-reliance when he travels for exhibitions or art fairs with his role as Artistic Director for the Møre og Romsdal Kunstsenter. His credentials in the last five years alone include serving as Stipend Jury Member of the Sami Center for Contemporary Art; Stipend Committee Member of NBK Prosjektstøttet; Member and Leader of the Norwegian Stipend Committee; Board member of Nordnorske Bildende Kunstnere and Nordnorsk Kunstnersenter; guest curatorship, teaching, and jury membership at organizations in Europe and the U.S. Numerous grants received include a five-year artist work grant in Norway and residencies in Europe and abroad.
Represented by Drawing Room in Manila, he recently mounted a solo exhibition there titled Mythologies in Transit. He was featured in the ALT Art Fair in Manila and the Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm early this year. Slated in the coming months into next year is a residency at Projeto Fidalgo in São Paulo and exhibitions at Surnadal Billag and the Sami Center for Contemporary Art in Norway, Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles, and Hin Bus Depot in Penang.
Pascua navigates the challenges of being an artist and an immigrant with drive, critical thinking, and gravitas. The Others is a life-size installation of a Manila slum comprising corrugated roof plates, lumber, lights, and the soundtrack of human activity, radio, and television. The Victoria is a small replica of the lone ship that managed to return to Spain after Magellan was killed in the Philippines, shown sinking to conjecture an alternative history had that ship not made it back to Spain. But he has not lost the funny Filipino bone. Grappling with learning a new language, he created Language Pills, oversized pills etched with Norwegian letters, one set “medicinal” and the other “recreational.”
What awaits finding in the mistranslations rife in diasporic life is sculpture–molded from ever-evolving struggle and longing. And yes, Pinoy humor.
*Note: A Portrait of the Filipino as an Artist is transposed from Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, itself a nod to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joaquin famously posited, “The identity of a Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.” He also wrote, “Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were, but what we have become; what we are at this moment.”
About the Contributor
Carina Evangelista is a curator and an artist. Currently Director at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Evangelista has worked in curatorial and/or editorial capacities at institutions both in the U.S. and the Philippines. She has served as Senior Director of Curatorial Affairs at Oklahoma Contemporary; as Deputy Director and subsequently Interim Director at Asia Society Museum and its Global Artistic Programs in New York; as Editor at Artifex Press (now Cahiers d’Art Institute); as Curator at Delaware Contemporary; and as Guest Curator and Guest Lecturer at Art Fair Philippines and universities in the Philippines. She started her career as an art professional at The Museum of Modern Art in New York where she worked on numerous exhibitions from Projects shows to retrospectives and the museum-wide exhibition, MoMA2000. Her published writing on Philippine art has featured artists such as Poklong Anading, Martha Atienza, Constancio Bernardo, Annie Cabigting, Bea Camacho, Roberto Chabet, Nilo Ilarde, Jet Pascua, Yasmin Sison-Ching, Gerardo Tan, and MM Yu. Evangelista's own creative practice has included writing the libretto for Manhid, a musical staged at the Cultural Center of the Philippines; serving as actor and lyricist for the film Pisay; mounting a solo exhibition titled Las Flores del Mal at MO_Space in Manila; and participating as visual artist in the Manila Biennale, Open City.
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