Installation: drawings, text

2018

 

Mga Maiikling Kuwento ni Onat is a fictive journal set in the 10th World Scout Jamboree which took place in Mount Makiling, Los Baños, Laguna from 17–26 July 1959. The journal relays Onat’s experiences of the Jamboree, from mundane events interrupted by magic, to folkloric encounters that elicit horror and awe.

These experiences are delivered through drawings and inscriptions informed by the author’s intimacies on his temporary ecosystem. Onat exhibits a fondness for the impossible flora, the mythical mountain, the good people he has met, and on occasion, sentient embers.

 

Within Onat’s individual proclivities are a couple of drawings with subtle charges against the Scouting movement in the Philippines, specifically the exact intentions of its introduction in our archipelago. These drawings express anxieties about Scouting as an imperial institution, mentioning its colonial provenance and corrupt conclusions.

 

Opposite the neocolonial concern is a retelling of Maria Makiling's myth, this time as an encounter between a woman that smells of petrichor, hauling earth and infinite waters with her bare implements, and a small group of lost scouts.

Mga Maiikling Kuwento ni Onat asserts that such local mythologies are among various resistive forces that prevent our complete ideological colonization.

 

 

Jo Tanierla