In philosopher Manuel DeLanda’s 1997 book A Thousand Nonlinear Years of History, the opening paragraph of the first chapter reads:
We live in a world populated by structures—a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history. Immersed as we are in this mixture, we cannot help but interact in a variety of ways with the other historical constructions that surround us, and in these interactions we generate novel combinations, some of which possess emergent properties. In turn, these synergistic combinations, whether of human origin or not, become the raw material for further mixtures. This is how the population of structures inhabiting our planet has acquired its rich variety, as the entry of novel materials into the mix triggers wild proliferations of new forms.[1]
These dynamic processes of interaction, generation, combination, and proliferation is reflected in Buen Calubayan’s sprawling oeuvre which encompasses an exhilarating array of forms ranging from paintings to drawings, videos to performances, installations to workshops, and research projects to pedagogical initiatives, among others. His works over the past years operate as encounters with and between disparate structures and historical constructions, which he amalgamates and short-circuits to give rise to new properties and perspectives, as well as interrogations of systems of power and control through inventive experimentations with alternative paths, models, and frameworks.
Andamyo: Access and appearance of maintenance and repair (2026) continues this approach while forming new connections between his longstanding research and notions of care. In emphasizing actions of “maintenance” and “repair,” the resonance of concepts like relationality, interdependence, ecology, collectivity, and the commons are heightened across the works in the show.
The exhibition’s title refers to the Filipino term for “scaffolding,” which Calubayan treats as a conceptual prompt. Drawing on how they provide a safe platform for reaching high and inaccessible areas, the artist further sought inspiration in its various qualities, like its ephemerality and contingent form as well as how its presence implies that something else is likewise in a fluid and mobile state (e.g. deterioration, incompleteness). Scaffoldings also place structures in a suspended state, deviating them momentarily from their intended functions to become monuments of stillness and anticipation—the temporality of structures become palpable when scaffolds are assembled around them.
Despite acknowledging the similar appearances and, at times, functions between scaffoldings and barricades, Calubayan asserts that only the former can give us access to “fleeting moments of ruptures and possibilities,” allowing us to perceive phenomena and the world anew. Moreover, the exhibition’s orientation towards “maintenance” and “repair” not only counteracts trite celebrations of “innovation” by highlighting labor that is typically obscured, directing our attention towards “individuals whose work keeps ordinary existence going rather than introducing novel things,”[2] but also articulates the artist’s assertion that the value of ruptures ultimately lies in how they produce spaces and positions from which care can emanate.
Calubayan’s fascination with scaffoldings coheres not only with certain themes present in his body of work (e.g. provisionality, permeability, perspective, function, etc.), but with his recurring experimentation with diagrams and exposure of the apparatuses, conceptual-theoretical frameworks, and systems that enable certain discourses and aesthetic practices to proliferate. In utilizing the scaffolding not merely as a metaphor but as, to borrow Rosalind Krauss’ term, a “technical support”[3] that provides the rules and basis for his works—“the underlying matrix” of his art production—Calubayan sought to have his works embody the diagram-as-scaffolding, specifically, as objects that fulfill the dual role of being a platform that safely provides access to unreachable areas and a bridge that facilitates movement from one state to another.
Diagrams have been described as “proliferators of a process of unfolding” and real-time thinking, “maps of movement” that are “capable of use across diverse fields of enquiry[…] valued for their capacity to reveal, foreground, and produce previously unrecognized relations.” Diagrammaticity in art, in particular, is valued not just for their functional and discursive specificity but for their aesthetic affect, and for how they “aim to realize or present what is transient, intensive, virtual, immanent, mobile and yet-to-come rather than to give an account of what might be physically or actually said to exist.” The increased interest in diagrams in art is also said to relate to a “politicization and psychologizing of art that brings art practice into close proximity and engagement with other fields of learning”, which moreover “[allows] humans to process information or attend to or produce worlds in different ways.”[4]
This capacity of diagrams to allow us to process information and produce worlds in different ways informs Calubayan’s approach to the diagram-as-scaffolding. Produced under this rubric, the artworks in the exhibition were based on actions, situations, and pedagogical practices and were conceptualized as both the result and the building blocks of an ongoing process of construction. This quality is perhaps most evidently embodied in the artist’s research notes. Across 130 pages, Calubayan constellates a panoply of research interests through lists, sketches, and citations, imagining and visualizing relations between diverse subjects, phenomena, and disciplines such as domestic labor, immunology, language, thermodynamics, phenomenology, modernity, and the indigenous struggle, among others. In contrast to the dynamic and frenetic energy crystallized in these notes, Self-Generative Patient Information and Admitting Order Form—a series of 34 graphite drawings compiled in a sketchbook—appears austere and clinical as it features sparse grids resembling those found in medical forms and other documents, raising questions pertaining to the body, bureaucratic systems, technology, and power-knowledge.
Both the notes and the sketchbook register, recontextualize, and defamiliarize routine—an impulse likewise conveyed in a series of large-scale diagrams silkscreened on the exhibition space’s walls. These diagrams illustrate motions such as commuting to work, resting, and performing cultural rituals—actions that may seem banal but, as Calubayan suggests, “constitute the rhythm from which the infrastructure of maintenance and repair in everyday life is built upon.” Processing various concerns of the artist ranging from the archival to the commons and cultural work to ecology, the diagrams consist of skewed axes, dizzying helices, and blankets of digital noise, choreographing a collision between philosophical concepts, quotidian elements, and readymade texts.
The oil paintings extend these inquiries into a medium anchored in tradition and dense with history. Calubayan draws on the idioms of impressionist painting and its emphasis on light, time, and movement as vital elements in perception and experience and repurposes it as a critique against extractivism, real estate speculation, and land-use conversion. These amorphous, painterly, and near-abstract renderings of natural scenes use images of excavation and construction sites as references, while the work’s titles—directly lifted from slogans of condominium and subdivision developers—acquire a caustic quality in its irony, contributing to an overall détournement of the tradition of landscape painting and its colonial-feudal histories.
In the show, each of the three oil paintings were paired with a diagram, bringing to the surface various associations and resonances between the two. Sharing a similar scale and square format, the artist intended for the works to be reminiscent of pixels as an allusion to how human perception, experience, and interaction with the world is increasingly being mediated by digital technology and the corporations in control of these. Visuality, opacity, and biopolitics also permeate and infuse Body Scans, a series of ten watercolor paintings. Produced with imagery of diagnostic procedures in mind, Calubayan collapses bodies with landscapes in utilizing the translucency of the medium to “‘see through’ the body/terrain from where areas of interest are ‘detected’ and mapped for maintenance and repair.” Moreover, for the artist, the watercolors “serve as preliminary exercises at the base of the scaffolding—setting the boundaries, identifying speculative areas, and mapping points of access, rupture and possibilities beyond what the exhibition can afford to give access to.”
The video triptych Meta/Stasis similarly fulfills these objectives as it occupies the intersections between land, labor, the body, and capital. Fixed shots of leaves gently swaying, workers perched atop a scaffold, and excavators preparing land for a construction project are juxtaposed. A contrast emerges between the depiction of processes of transformation, of altering landscapes and converting raw materials into architecture, and the work’s title and cinematic language, which both evoke inertia and transcendence. Additionally, the work’s title fuses these notions with impressions of a pathogenic agent or cancerous tumor spreading across a body or a momentary stoppage of flow, suggesting that such transformations depicted in the videos may not always be beneficial.
Indeed, conjoined to the exhibition’s emphasis of care are such undercurrents of grim realities, fears, and anxieties revolving around land issues, labor exploitation, health problems, environmental destruction, surveillance capitalism, and the waning of affect, all of which Calubayan attempts to make sense of and render sensible to the audience. Both maintenance and repair imply states of deterioration and malfunction, while scaffoldings also bring to mind precarity, instability, and various hazards. Moreover, Calubayan’s works pertaining to land allude to the country’s semi-feudal condition marked by rampant land grabbing, community displacement, and conversion of land towards non-productive uses amid the widespread landlessness suffered by the majority class of peasants. At the time of writing, these aspects of the exhibition bring to mind recent tragedies such as a construction site accident (e.g. the collapse of a nine-story building on May 24 in Angeles City), a garbage landslide (e.g. the Binaliw landfill in Cebu City), and suspicious fires ravaging urban poor communities (most of which had been designated as sites for massive infrastructure projects).[5] To climb up a scaffolding allows one to access new vantage points and facilitate change, but not without risks.
“If the diagram is a scaffolding,” the final sentence in the exhibition note reads, “perhaps what is being built here is an alternate truth that liberates us from the need to view from a standpoint and just live without the fear of a free fall.” The allusions to verticality aligns with other writings on what, as Hito Steyerl notes, many contemporary philosophers have pointed out as a “prevailing condition of groundlessness” distinguishing our present moment.
This state of free fall, Steyerl describes in her 2011 essay “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective”, entails the shattering of traditional modes of seeing and feeling, the disruption of any sense of balance, the twisting and multiplying of perspectives—a disorientation partly due to the loss of a stable horizon, and with that, “the departure of a stable paradigm of orientation, which has situated concepts of subject and object, of time and space, throughout modernity.”[6] Steyerl proceeds to sketch out in this brief essay a rough history of our spatial-temporal orientation leading up to this state of free fall, starting from the concept of a horizon to the development of linear perspective and up to its dismantling as a result of new technologies, modes of representation, and understandings of time and space. With the advent of aerial views, satellite imagery, and surveillance technology, the former distinction between object and subject in the paradigm of linear perspective “is exacerbated and turned into the one-way gaze of superiors onto inferiors, a looking down from high to low.” These new views from above, as Steyerl describes, “is a perfect metonymy for a more general verticalization of class relations in the context of an intensified class war from above—seen through the lenses and on the screens of military, entertainment, and information industries.”
Juxtaposing Steyerl’s points with Calubayan’s articulations—which Steyerl would perhaps regard as one of many “temporary, contingent, and partial attempts at grounding”—gives rise to numerous counter-examples. For example, with Calubayan’s conceptualization of scaffolding, it is not the detached and distant perspective of aerial views that is privileged, but proximity, the act of working directly with matter, whether to construct, maintain, or repair. In Andamyo, the imaginary stable grounds of such “views from above” are not provided by the high-tech of drones and satellites, but the low-tech of rails, planks, and clamps. Lastly, these vantage points are not imagined to be occupied by the ruling classes, but the (semi-)proletariat. For Calubayan, scaffoldings enable invisible labor rather than provide the illusory stability of a God’s-eye view.
However, this is not to advocate a return to frameworks rendered obsolete by the development of the forces of production. As Steyerl argues, if we were to accept “the multiplication and de-linearization of horizons and perspectives[...] the new tools of vision may also serve to express, and even alter, the contemporary conditions of disruption and disorientation.” Additionally, the internal contradictions within this new, dominant perspective can be harnessed: “if the new views from above recreate societies as free-falling urban abysses and splintered terrains of occupation, surveilled aerially and policed biopolitically, they may also—as linear perspective did—carry the seeds of their own demise within them.” A way out or through can be reached by repurposing these new tools of vision and understanding the laws of contradiction.
Scaffoldings, as Calubayan conceptualizes them, may offer respite or brief moments of pause and anchoring amid a general condition of free fall. But this state of free fall may also not be as damning as we presume. As Steyerl writes,
[...]the perspective of free fall teaches us to consider a social and political dreamscape of radicalized class war from above, one that throws jaw-dropping social inequalities into sharp focus. But falling does not only mean falling apart, it can also mean a new certainty falling into place. Grappling with crumbling futures that propel us backwards onto an agonizing present, we may realize that the place we are falling toward is no longer grounded, nor is it stable. It promises no community, but a shifting formation.
In these unstable, ever-shifting, and crisis-ridden times, the desire for scaffoldings, grounding, and moments of rupture and possibilities does not necessarily indicate a desperate scramble for something to hold onto so as to not plunge into an abyss—it could also constitute “a new certainty falling into place” and lead to acts of resistance, intimate gestures, and optimistic expressions of the collective ambition to construct, maintain, repair, and ultimately improve the world for all.
Endnotes
1. Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Zone Books, 1997), 25– 26.
2. Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, “Hail the maintainers” (Aeon, 7 April 2016).
3. Rosalind E. Krauss, Under Blue Cup (The MIT Press, 2011).
4. All quotations in this paragraph are from the Introduction to Drawing Analogies: Diagrams in Art, Theory and Practice (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2025) by David Burrows, John Cussans, Dean Kenning, and Mary Yacoob. The first two in particular are from the work of Susanne Leeb, as cited by the authors in the “Introduction.”
5. Minerva Jane San Miguel, “Where does the fire come from?” (IBON Foundation, 5 June 2026).
6. Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective” (e-flux Journal issue 24, 2011).