An Ecological, The Obligatory

Within the frame of Public Engagement and Artistic Formation, this initiation outlines the ground for accumulating and reviewing resources (institutions/infrastructures) and references (actors/agents) for the research direction of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. It sets four terms into motion: the public/s, engagement, the artistic, and formation. The method of temporarily collapsing the clusters of “public engagement” and “artistic formation” aims to design pathways for reading the multiple gaps and intersections across practices of access, exchange, custodianship, and reception in the Philippine cultural sector.

It is loosely divided into four segments: Scenes of Access, Patterns of Exchange, Modes of Custodianship, and Fields of Reception. These rubrics are generative intermediaries in studying attachments and affiliations in the contexts of artistic production, and in the histories of institutions and institution building.

Initially, it elects three ecologies of practices: Los Baños through the Philippine High School for the Arts and the International Rice Research Institute; Siliman University as an interface to liberal (arts) education in Southern Philippines; Aga Khan Museum of Islamic Art at Mindanao State University through the journal archives of the Institute of Islamic Studies at University of the Philippines, Diliman.