When we are given access to a passing moment of rupturing and possibilities, we can navigate and view something from a position where care can emanate. The nature and function of the diagram as scaffolding is explored and examined by the artist by looking into the structures of the view deck, the help desk, and the construction site as a framework of perception that is emblematic of the interconnectedness of everything we sense as part of communities and worlds. The andamyo (the Filipino term for scaffolding), as a temporary structure used to support workers and materials during construction, maintenance, and repair of buildings and other structures, provides a safe platform for working at height and reaching inaccessible areas. Because it is erected not for its own sake, it always follows the shape of what is being built or repaired. Its presence means that something is in a state of mobility, incompleteness, or deterioration. It practically makes a structure unusable, taken into a halt from its intended function to become a monument of anticipation, temporality, and stillness.
The artworks in this exhibition are utilized as both the result and the building blocks of an ongoing process under construction; establishing the scaffold as both an effective metaphor and a modality. Paintings, drawings, diagrams, videos, and installations are based on actions, situations, and pedagogical practices. For instance, the titles of the paintings are taken from slogans of condominiums and subdivision developers; they are referenced from the site of excavations. The diagrams are illustrations of our movements as we go to work, perform cultural rituals, slow down or take a rest. They constitute the rhythm from which the infrastructure of maintenance and repair in everyday life is built upon. The impulse to display the normalcy of routine becomes a tool for coping with, maybe even processing, the realities revealed in the artist’s sketchbook and research notes. If the diagram is a scaffolding, 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.
Thus, to build the scaffolding with movement-diagrams is to reclaim the meshwork of everyday life from the blueprint of modernity. It provides us the platforms for agency to negotiate living—from the micro-movements of housework to the grand gestures of reforms and revolutions. The installation encourages the audience to reactivate the diagrams based on their own taskscapes and sensory immersions that form a community’s shared life. It reminds the pedestrian that such diagrams are active somatic architecture, from which every step they take is a creative act of writing onto the earth, turning it into the invisible scaffold that dictates how we sense, feel, and experience the texture of ordinary life. In everyday aesthetics, rhythmic intervals illuminate the organization of time, space, and sensory feedback, preventing everyday life from becoming a chaotic blur. Such a view can only be accessed by making these invisible traces visible, revealing that the choreography of life is not a passive routine, but an ongoing, active construction of aesthetic reality.
