MAYNILA MAALINSANGAN ANG GABI, MAHAPDI ANG ARAW THE NIGHT IS RESTLESS, THE DAY IS SCORNFUL

ARNDT SINGAPORE. GILLMAN BARRACKS. BLK 22 LOCK ROAD #01-35 WWW.ARNDTBERLIN.COM

CURRATEDBYNORMANCRISOLOGO TATONG RECHETA TORRES MIKE ADRAO POW MARTINEZ NORBERTO ROLDAN GABBY BARREDO JOSE LEGASPI JIGGER CRUZ ZEAN CABANGIS KAWAYAN DE GUIA JOSE TENCE RUIZ SANTI BOSE DEX FERNANDEZ KALOY SANCHEZ ALFREDO ESQUILLO ALWIN REAMILLO

ARNDT SINGAPORE. GILLMAN BARRACKS. BLK 22 LOCK ROAD #01-35 WWW.ARNDTBERLIN.COM Working in contemporary art is a privilege and the collaboration with living artists exiting and permanent source of inspiration and surprise. Working with a curator is an additional thrill for the dealer, as when giving „Carte Blanche“ to an external expert, the galerist himself is joining the audience, in their „Vorfreude“/enthusiastic anticipation for the venue. Like every other passionate art viewer the gallery owner is trying to imagine what the final show will look like, impatient to witness the dialogues the various works will enter with another.

I am that fortunate galerist and Norman Crisologo is the curator of MAYNILA: MAALINSANGAN ANG GABI, MAHAPDI ANG ARAW (: THE DAY IS SCORNFUL, THE NIGHT IS RESTLESS). Norman Crisologo is not just an expert for Filippino Contemporary Art, he is also a collector, early-on supporter and follower of many artists careers but most importantly he is the artists friend. The idea for this show was born during one of the fascinating expeditions Norman, Insider and connoisseur of the incredibly rich and vibrant Philippine artworld, took me on. I immediately realised that if I would like to understand the recent developements in Contemporary Philippine Art better, I would have to explore Manila further. This vast, haunting, most vibrant and complex social and cultural organism that accomodates so many of this countries major artists, providing them stories, conflict and issues, some of the sourcematerial for their work.

In one of our conversations, Norman Crisologo said that this exhibition will be more about evoking a „feeling“ than making a curatorial statement and far from claiming a comprehensive overview about Filippino Contemporary Art.

I see this presentation as an „insiders guide“ and open invitation to go on a journey to the darker side of Manila, where the inspiration lays for so many visual artists, performing artists and filmmakers. Following in their footsteps and spirit we can get our own „Manila-Feeling“ and insight in this fascinating artistic universe.

I thank Norman Crisologo for this incredibly generous contribution of enthusiasm, knowledge and passion with which he brought this exhibition together and for his support and advice to the artists during the production period. My utmost gratitude goes to the artists for accepting our invitation and contributing such outstanding new work to the show. And last but never the least, I would like to thank Sonia Jakimczyk, our gallery manager in Singapore and Tobias Sirtl, Lisa Polten and Karina Rozwadowska in Berlin for their steady and kind support.

Matthias Arndt I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY, AND I JUST SAID IT.

NORMAN CRISOLOGO “PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF...”

It can be said that if you wander in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, you will either become a prophet or a madman. Or perhaps both.

But in Manila, it seems that it doesn’t take that long.

As much as the city itself is a bustling metropolis, it is also a wasteland of the lost. Stand long enough in a corner and you can spot them: these solitary figures that stand, for all the world rushing past them, alone. Approaching them, you may even catch their attention long enough for them to return your stare… and then look past you. Move in even closer, you might even begin to discern their voices above the din, maybe reciting strange litanies to deities that have long absconded their houses of dwelling and left them to the devout and faithful to loiter in—or rather they may be in conversation with the city itself, allowing it to speak to them through the bang and clatter of the sidewalk, the cacophony of the car horns in traffic, or the susurrus of the waves from the bay. Arguably, these are true citizens of Manila, who are not mere fixtures in the urban landscape but possibly, keep the vision of the city alive—even if only in their minds.

“Maynila: Maalinsangan ang Gabi, Mahapdi ang Araw” (Manila: The Nights are Restless, The Days are Scornful), is an exhibition of Filipino contemporary art that collects these visions and hears those voices. It chronicles a secret history of Manila—one that also considers the graffiti scrawled on the walls and counts the chalk outlines on the pavement as part of its story.

There are no heroes and villains here, just the usual suspects.

And all endings resound like the conclusion of prayers.

ERWIN ROMULO TATONG RECHETA TORRES

There is something cinematic in the paintings of Tatong Recheta Torres. Like stills from a complex and indecipherable feature film, his canvases capture a specific moment, not necessarily one full of tension or suspense, but one of anticipation. They are frames that signal that something is about to happen.

This cinematic sensibility comes naturally from a man who grew up under the shadows of downtown Manila’s once esteemed but now derelict cinemas, and whose childhood was nourished by a diet of horror and fantasy films in Betamax format. An architecture graduate, Torres is mostly entirely self-taught in the vocation of painting, though his apparent skill as a draughtsman is the product of early practice.

The shifts one finds every time Torres releases a body of work reflect a restless desire for experimentation. He takes up the challenge of representing texture—scales, globules, hair—as a means to build his fictive worlds. His recent obsession with virtual reality feeds newer works where images tamed by pixels and code cross with dreamy scenes culled from memory.

MIKE ADRAO

In an age enamored with installation, conceptual, or performance art, does good old drawing still have a chance to be recognized? Artists like Mike Adrao show that draughtsmanship still matters and that drawing remains a dynamic and unexhausted field. His large, charcoal canvases depicting anthropomorphic and biological forms show control, rigor and imagination. These images—each one teeming with intricate detail—are first born in his trusted sketchbook. On a large canvas inside his tiny studio above an Internet cafe, the mild-mannered Adrao lays them out and pieces them together in a slow, deliberate, physically demanding but sometimes meditative process.

For this show, his ruminations on the sinister qualities of the city— the decadence, the corruption, the environmental negligence, the temptations of wealth and power—yield a charcoal, chiaroscuro work that is an allegory of life in the Philippine capital. It shows how little by little one is consumed by the grip of its structures and systems. Integrating Philippine currency vignettes and lacework, exploding manunggol jars and reptilian elements, the work can be turned upside-down, mimicking the topsy-turvy manner of existence in a desperately dense and chaotic setting.

POW MARTINEZ

Irreverent, farcical, fantastic. Such can be said of the paintings of Pow Martinez, whose images range from improbable, cartoonish scenes executed in rough strokes to heavy impastos that near abstraction. He remains a believer of painting, of its endurance and inexhaustible potential. Perhaps the genre now suffers from the ease of falling to predictability and commoditization, which Martinez heavily guards his practice against. And so what he delivers are works that echo the city he lives in: brash and unpredictable, never tame.

Consider his two pieces here. One depicts the contortions of a hermaphrodite-like figure whose breasts and other extremities pull out like gum. The other mimics a familiar high point of many suspense films: the dining scene. We bear witness to what is supposed to be a revolting instance of cannibalism, but Martinez has caricatured it to an almost comic effect.

Such works reveal the irony that has become a leitmotif in the artist’s practice. Another is the fight against safe, sentimental, and pleasure-seeking aesthetics. Yes, this might be bad art for some, but perhaps rebellion is the point of the exercise. This hard-headedness and certain distrust for the ruling convention may have rubbed off from living in a city that saw many revolutions, and has long prized freedom of expression and individuality. Martinez confides he likes the city’s dirt and grit, and he allows his paintings to be similarly so. He prefers to ransack what is from the underground, the counterculture, the juvenile. Settling for what is mainstream is just plain insulting.

NORBERTO ROLDAN

“Every act an artist makes is political,” says Norberto Roldan. In his paintings, installations, or intricate assemblages, one can always detect the biting social criticism in his works. Be it attacks on and rampant consumerism or oppressive systems of power, he has made his practice an avenue not just of personal expression but pure activism. For him, it is unconscionable that an artist does not engage. “One cannot turn a blind eye on political reality, no matter how apolitical your art may be.” To Roldan, every artist is part of a community and a country, and his practice has to find its place within these. Such political decisions extend to activities far beyond art-making. One example is his founding and running of Green Papaya Art Projects, one of the longest- running artist-run initiatives in Manila. It supports alternative and unrepresented voices and encourages critical discourse.

His work “Quiapo: Between Salvation and Damnation” involves a simulacrum of the famed Manila church that has been central to the city’s cultural and political histories. More than any other church, Quiapo has come to occupy an exceptional place within the Filipino imagination. Here is a site where Christian, Muslim and pagan beliefs intersect. It is where quotidian violence and debaucheries take place so close to where religious rites are practiced. A microcosm of Manila, the church and its grounds mirror the city’s former glories—now drowned out by the mire of urban blight, but also representing the colorful, divergent fabric from which the Filipino nation is made.

GABBY BARREDO

Entering the artist’s workshop in a Manila suburb is like walking into a laboratory found only in the pages of science fiction. Here one finds discarded objects salvaged from junk shops, or donations by friends who were clearing out their houses. Under Gabriel Barredo’s hands, these unwanted materials are given new purpose. Old action figures, limbless dolls, saints in plastic, car parts, rubber strips, animal bone, art book cutouts, miniscule lights, and tiny motors. Almost like a scientist, he cuts, refashions, gilds, welds, and glues them together into an intricate, mechanical mass. What results is captivating and one- of-a-kind kinetic art, some of which are towering in scale.

But the potency of Barredo’s work does not only lie in the flawless regeneration of rescued material and its definitely amusing light and electric circuitries. In fact, his work is very severe. It is littered with details that remind us of the endless horrors and hypocrisies of life: hunger, war, death, and decay. A screaming head here, an impaled figurine there. There is no attempt to sugarcoat these displays of darkness, whether they are personal or collective in nature. Like Bosch and Brueghel, Barredo continues art’s long tradition of depicting the monstrous and the malign. In such acts, we are confronted with the blade-sharp truths and are provoked to emotion.

JOSE LEGASPI

Jose Legaspi knows the human body intimately —its creases and folds, its thickness and ends. But his works also show a certain skepticism. In his drawings, he subjects the body to much humiliation and profanity, at times drawing blood. He renders his characters ghostly and pallid, sometimes mangled, almost like cadavers.

His works vary in texture, from his roughly doodled pastel drawings to striking, meticulously made photorealistic works. They sometimes portray the artist himself or people he is close to as ghoulish figures, often in debasing positions.

These three works of charcoal and chalk belong to the larger ‘Phlegm’ installation. It was the outcome of a residency Legaspi held at Art in General in New York in 2001. According to the organization, it is a work, “that incorporates religious iconography, autobiography, and self-portraiture.”

One shows a man hanging from a noose, his genitals exposed, possibly an act of suicide or a victim of lynching. Another shows a crucified figure bleeding profusely all over. But the most striking is the drawing of a body, chopped up and thrown to the rubbish bin.

It can be speculated that it is Legaspi’s training as a biologist that affords him the distance from such violations of the body. From one side, these can be seen as an attack on our relentless obsession for the youth and vanity, something that eventually expires. From the other, they speak of emotional torture, estrangement and rage felt by the openly gay artist who lives in a country where conservative attitudes still prevail.

Legaspi, who has been cited in Phaidon’s latest global survey on drawing, Vitamin D, produces works that pander to our basest emotions. On his canvases, he lets the Id loose. They are a riposte to our moralism and misplaced values. In putting these lurid pictures into view, we see that we haven’t seen everything in drawing yet.

JIGGER CRUZ

The tradition of western painting in Asia has had its longest streak in the . It dates back to Spanish priests who taught local artists to paint religious scenes for the churches they had built. Art schools that espoused the western style soon opened. This was followed by artists who travelled to study in art academies in Europe, plus a generation who made a groundbreaking encounter with modernism.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that today’s generation of Filipino painters seek to deviate from this thread. Or at least remake it. One of them is Jigger Cruz, whose most recent works explore the possibilities of painting beyond the plane. For him, the canvas is no longer just a vessel for flat images. Rather, it too can function like a platform, a stage on which to hold his experiments. His probing concerns specifically with oil paint’s physicality: volume, sheen, and viscosity.

Over an under painting, he throws very generous, almost obscene amounts of oil paint to obtain a sculptural dimensionality. For this show, he stacks three paintings executed in three different modes. This is then overrun by deposits of oil almost psychedelic in color and then cut open with a putty knife. The gross anatomy lays bare Cruz’s present preoccupation: the constant struggle between abstraction and figuration, as well as the relentless battle between tradition versus the avant-garde.

ZEAN CABANGIS

A ruin can generate so much feeling of mystery. It can be the object of deep speculation. What is its history? How did it arrive at such a fate? What will be its future? Such are the questions that preoccupy Zean Cabangis, one of the youngest artists in this show. His recent ongoing series of work was strung together from encounters with old, abandoned houses he chanced upon during his bicycle excursions in the mountains of the Sierra Madre. These are houses that have been left abandoned, their roofs caved in, walls left unfinished, and floors are overgrown with weeds. But they are nothing more than interruptions on the landscape—reminders of dreams that have been stunted by financial difficulty, natural catastrophe or changes in family circumstances.

One does not have to drive far out of the city to see such houses. They can even be seen within gated middle class subdivisions where properties are left abandoned and decaying as their owners find lives in other, more prosperous shores. Cabangis attempts to reclaim these structures’ dignity by piecing together parts of their selves, almost brick by brick.

These works recall Fernando Amorsolo’s paintings of a Manila destroyed by the Second World War. Flattened by bombs and fire, they show buildings bereft of human presence and whose glory and purpose have turned to ash.

Curator Brian Dillon in a recent show for Tate Britain showed that ruin lust has captured the attention of artists for centuries and that this interest continues up until today. Ruins possess latent, quiet beauty but also portend of something uncertain, if not ominous. They may suggest the coming of a new life out of the rubble, but likewise reminds us of our vulnerability to the sudden turns of fortune.

KAWAYAN DE GUIA

In the year 2007, the world reached an important milestone. It was the first time more people lived in cities than outside of them. Cities retain their pull because they remain places where destinies are made and dreams realized. But not all stories of migration to urban centers end happy. Such is the case for Ligaya Paraiso and Julio Madiaga, the protagonists of the acclaimed Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka’s 1975 film, Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag (The Claws of Light), whose hopes of a better life far from the province were dashed.

De Guia took his cues from this important film for his multi- panel work, Ligaya de Pilipinas or “Joy of the Philippines.” Unraveling on the pictorial plane are images suggestive of the megacity’s promises of progress as well as chaos. It is a topical representation of a city enjoying an unprecedented building boom. Take the avenues to any of its several business districts early in the morning and one sees hundreds of construction workers off to work riding in trucks, many, much like Julio, have come from afar to take gainful employment.

But today’s city is no less harsh than Brocka’s vision of Manila. The capital’s development mimics the skyward trajectories of other cities the world over, where the gap between the ultra- rich who dwell in luxury penthouses and the poor who live in shantytowns at street level are more than a few floors apart.

De Guia has received important regional prizes such as the Ateneo, Signature, and Philip Morris art awards. His works have shown in spaces in Singapore, Germany, China, and Australia. He is also a primary convener of the Ax(is) art project, a collective that organized yearly festivals in Baguio and whose output was shown at the Singapore Art Museum at the 2013 Singapore Biennale.

JOSE TENCE RUIZ

Recalling the seven arrows of the Christian martyr, St Sebastian, seven bars covered in aluminum skin pierce a chunk of hammered lead. This lump, suggestive of a prostrated body, is harnessed by a tangle of velvet belts that seem to act both as a protective cloak and a straitjacket. At its feet are cement slabs that carry a play on the Filipino words lumot (to molder) and limot (to forget).

In the Philippines, religion keeps a strong foothold and the country’s artists have been reacting since time immemorial. There are those that have and still employ their talents to create its iconic imagery, and there are those who like Ruiz, which criticize its processes and have braved to bring the debate to such difficult terrain.

Ruiz is particularly attracted to contradictions that appear in organized religion. Raised as a Catholic, he has many times reflected on the complex set of rules a belief system imposes on its followers. The sculpture, “Excruciate Ecstasy,” revisits the theme.

“Rules are like rope or wings. They can be your protection but they can gag you,” he says. These can give you a sense of rootedness, but can similarly immobilize. But people ironically crave for them, because life is chaotic and religion has a way of stabilizing.”

His sculpture also touches on the duality of pleasure and pain. This is something with which the Christian faithful negotiates within a universe of established rules. Sacrifices have to be made to achieve deliverance. “All struggle moves in and out between this two: ecstasy and pain,” he observes. It is a dichotomy he finds baffling. It is the jumping point from which his sculpture proceeds.

Ruiz makes reference to the baroque imagery of St Sebastian, who has been depicted in the height of spiritual ecstasy as arrows cut through his flesh. Influenced by Ipoustéguy, Barlach, and Boccioni, he however makes useof distilled figuration, a manner that has made an impression on the generation of Filipino artists to which he belongs.

But make no mistake. This work is not a reckless diatribe against the Christian belief system. Rather it is a considered and reasoned reaction to a reality within it. The artist after all recognizes the symbiosis between art and religion, the former advancing the message of the latter, a relationship that thrived in Europe and thrives up to now in the Philippines.

What his sculpture does try to unravel are the idiosyncrasies that exist in that system. From such realization, one could perhaps move towards a rethink. That however entails Socratic humility, that one knows nothing. As Ruiz says, “one does not own anything absolute. Everything participates with its own contradiction.”

SANTIAGO BOSE

Baguio-born Santiago is one of the important Filipino artists in recent history. As an art-maker, mentor, and founder of the Baguio Arts Festival, his artistic practice has been marked by an overwhelming desire in building a community among artists and making their work connected to the wider community they are situated in.

He studied painting at the University of the Philippines, but he decided to choose other media to channel his visions. In her book, Image to Meaning, respected critic Alice Guillermo notes Bose’s desire to break from the limiting two- dimensionality and ‘illusionist aesthetic’ of the genre. And so he worked found objects and mixed media to give his work its own vocabulary and dimension. This courage to take the less treaded path got the nod of many. His art has shown in major museums in the Asia-Pacific and he participated in important triennials and festivals.

Guillermo distinctly highlights the spontaneous and experimentalist tendencies palpable in Bose’s work. Equally noticeable, as seen in his work at this show, is social and political consciousness. The mixed media work “I love Abu Sayaff” is one of the last works he had made before he died in 2002 at the age of 53. It appeared at a significant retrospective of his works at the Vargas Museum in ten years after, in a commemorative exhibition curated by Patrick Flores.

DEX FERNANDEZ

Graffiti has always been seen as an indicator of the prevalence of disorder and deprivation in a city. But people ignore that it too is a barometer for the level of self-expression. Dex Fernandez is one of those Manila artists whose street-inspired art has obtained a distinctive mien. His Garapata Man or ‘Flea’ Man is an original comic-book-like character that has almost become his signature and emblem. This caricatured representation of a man/house parasite has appeared on public walls as stickers or spray painted graffiti. It also appears in Fernandez’s wildly intricate murals, which have graced walls of museums as well as commercial centers.

Another vein in Fernandez’s practice is his mixed media work. He normally employs photographs and found images, which he overlays with his knotty illustrations in paint. Here we see the same light- handed dexterity to render his complex and unpredictable detailing. These works have a hallucinatory effect on one hand, but also fires off snippets of satire. Such exercises of wit and sarcasm, cloaked under his dainty drawings, carry Fernandez’s own deeper views on surviving the city. It just so happens his way of messaging is both comfortable inside gallery walls as well as rundown streets.

KALOY SANCHEZ

A critic once wrote that the Filipino concept of privacy is that there is none. There is evidence for it in the everyday; from the way our traditional houses are constructed to the way we consume content in social media. And with Manila being the most densely populated city in the planet, it is so easy to crash into other people’s business, whether it is by decision or not.

Kaloy Sanchez lets us fall into such private scenes. The painter gives us glimpses into various states of the human condition, as they are experienced in isolation in personal spaces: anger, loneliness, physical pleasure, mania, lethargy, slow decay. His canvases are like windows into his subjects’ intimate lives, framing them in at a particular instance, with us peeking through like voyeurs.

Sanchez’s depictions have been compared to the fleshy portraits of Lucian Freud as well as the works of Egon Schiele. The nudes that line his practice do not follow the classical take on the idealized body, but rather leans towards what is ordinary but genuine. Often raw, unembellished, and monochromatic, his paintings lay bare the tentativeness of our bodies and existence, and the psychological burden of having to face this fact alone.

“Onania” is an explicit acrylic and graphite portrait of a seated female wrapped in a sarong. She is pleasuring herself inside an apartment illuminated by neon lights from the street outside. It is a work that opens up to multiple subtexts. For instance, this gesture easily slips into the thorny issue of the objectification of women. Here, after all, the woman is the focus of the gaze of three onlookers: the dog, the man off- frame and the viewer.

Sanchez insists that this is not his intention. It is, however, a remaking of an early portrait. In that work it was he who was masturbating. Then as it is now, he revisits the theme of taboos that remain prevalent in today’s societies in spite of having become technologically modern. “Why don’t we talk about it, if everyone is doing it?” he contends. Furthermore, his work stokes a further debate: that of how much religion should play a hand in the matters of the body and private life. This painting and his previous one show Sanchez’s position on where the limits could lie.

ALFREDO ESQUILLO

Quiapo has long inspired artists such as Alfredo Esquillo Jr. who make periodic visits to this revered district of Manila and the famed church that sits at its center. Quiapo is a universe of its own, where Christian and pagan traditions meld together, religious dogma intertwines with the occult and superstition, while commerce does its business on one side. The periphery of the church is the site where many of these beliefs are professed; some are even brazenly peddled. On its pavement, aphrodisiacs, sex toys, and implements for black magic share space with amulets, prayer books, and Christian holy figures. Bizarre and almost contradictory, their coexistence points to a culture that places high importance on devotion and faith.

One of Quiapo’s established characters has been the subject of Esquillo’s artwork for more than a decade. Lauro Gonzales or Mang Lauro, a one-time trader turned preacher, believed that the Philippines is the New Jerusalem. This prophet of a belief tinged with has appeared in many of the artist’s hyperrealist paintings and has been the subject of one of his video documentaries. On one hand, it is the resonance of Mang Lauro’s life story to that of Esquillo’s own father that made the preacher interesting to him. On the other, it is also what Mang Lauro represents: The embodiment of the country’s relationship with spirituality, one that is intensified and made complex by the interweaving of belief systems, both foreign and indigenous.

ALWIN REAMILLO

You know you are in Filipino home if there is a picture of the Last Supper in the dining room. This iconic scene showing Jesus Christ partaking his last meal with his disciples before he is crucified is a fixture in Filipino dining setting. But while there is nothing extraordinary of finding this scene in a dining area—Leonardo da Vinci’s “Il Cenacolo” after all was painted in a dining hall—what is notable is the Biblical scene’s persistence as a subject for artists throughout the centuries and across countries.

Alwin Reamillo has produced a large-scale cabinet to frame a refashioned Last Supper layered with political undertones. Its base print consists of versions of the painting taken from the internet and another by an unknown artist, mass-produced and sold on the sidewalks of .

A version of this textile work of was first seen in a previous five-city installation, “Semena Santa Cruxtations.” It is now reincarnated as the focal point of this tableau. One can make out the glow of light that illuminates Christ at the center, while the apostles huddle at his side. Normally coming in a frame, this common and kitschy icon is enlarged to create an expanse suggestive of a theatre curtain, with the cabinet acting as the proscenium to the artists’ narratives.

The detritus of human presence and consumption interrupts this solemn scene. There are plastic bottles, syringes, cow bones, spoons and mortar, garlic peelings, and hair. Peppering it are text, company logos, and graphics, some image grafted by the artist into the fabric like skin, to join the cast of Disney characters looming in the background.

The result is a work that overflows with iconography that reveals the artist’s current preoccupation: identity formation and loss through the homogenization of culture as a result of transnationalism and globalization. He also makes salient the economies of power that fuel this condition.

One leitmotif that makes an appearance in this piece is the matchbox—an object that Reamillo has repeatedly reimagined as a form and carrier of images and meaning. In fact, this tableau is an oversized matchbox. Matchboxes are a product of industry and commerce, a container of graphic imagery. They are portable and disposable. But what they contain carry a certain power: the capacity to bring something to light and start a fire.

MANILA: THE CITY THAT WOULD NOT WEEP

In geological terms, Manila lies on young swamps, created from says, “Manila would find itself without masons, cooks, barbers, the pressure exerted by basaltic magma beneath the earth’s crust, carpenters, cobblers, tailors, smiths, scribes, printers, cowboys and emerging from the womb of the River only within the last accountants.” In the end, the Sangleys would be relocated into a 1.7 million years, or 62 million years after the dinosaurs mass- new district known as , which still stands today, claimed as asphyxiated. For 99.95% of its history, Manila was occupied by the oldest Chinatown in the world. Stegodons, then elephants. Christ, Caesar, and Confucius had been dead for over a thousand years before the (so far) earliest traces The saving grace of the Spaniards was that they did not bring of humans in Manila were discovered. The discovery was made in with them the same communicable diseases that wiped out 90% the 1960s, in the now low-key Santa Ana district, beside one of the of the peoples they conquered in the Americas. Or perhaps the very few old Manila churches that had survived the Second World Malay stock was just sturdier. The Spanish also brought with them War. A mass grave site was unearthed, with over two hundred Christianity—of the muscular sort honed from the centuries-long war bodies buried together with over one thousand pieces of Chinese of liberation of the Spanish homeland from the Moors. The Catholic earthenware dated to around 1000 to 1200 CE. Some of these prelates appear to have been especially perverse towards the well- bodies were found with Chinese plates inverted over their faces being of the natives to whom they preached. The Philippines is the and over their sex organs. No one knows why, though modern-day only former colony of Spain today where Spanish never took hold as minds might assume that some sort of Christian modesty had an the common popular tongue, in large part due to the refusal of the influence. The graves are likewise oriented in a scatter of directions, friars to have Filipinos learn the language. A succession of secular except towards the East. Again, no one knows why. Spanish municipal governments installed in Manila were frustrated by the insistence of the Church to maintain control; one Governor- The etymological story of Manila skews towards the pastoral, rooted General found himself at the receiving end of a murderous lynch in unremarkable shrubbery that once dominated the mob stoked by most unpacifist friars. shores of . Scyphiphora Hydrophyllacea in Linneanese, nila in Tagalog. “May nila,” (there is nila), a helpful native once told There is no escaping that despite the constitutional wall that divides an imperious stranger who demanded to know where he stood. church and state, the Philippines remains Catholic to the bone. Every Filipinos have always been known for their kindness to strangers. television station pauses programming at three in the afternoon to broadcast a prayer dedicated to the Divine Mercy of Jesus. Every It was strangers from Spain who undertook the organization of government office has a Catholic altar at worst, a Catholic prayer Manila as a city, with all the formal paperwork that was involved. room at best, perhaps to help mitigate the stench of corruption The Spanish were not the first Westerners to set foot in Manila; the that otherwise pervades. The most attended events inside even Portuguese had already been engaged in trade with Manileños. the toniest of shopping malls are the Sunday masses. Yet Filipino Rajah Soliman, the young ruler of Manila, had heard of the Spanish Catholicism is a brand that developed with minimal interference conquest of other in the archipelago. He sought to bide from faraway Rome, more susceptible to the influence of old animist time. When the first Spanish warships sailed into Manila Bay, he instincts than of the European doctors of the Church. entered into a pact of friendship with Goiti, the leader of the armada. This pact, as with a disturbing number of prominent contracts in Go to Quiapo Church, home of a much-touched, much-kissed Black Philippine history, was sealed in blood. Soliman, however, had every Nazarene statue. Unless the doors are shut (and they rarely are), the intention of slaughtering his new fair-skinned friends but thought it scene inside is of constant frenzy. There are the walkers roaming prudent to await first the arrival of the rains in June. Fatefully, Manila from venerated icon to venerated icon; the stationary kneelers in June of 1571 remained dry, and the forces of the just-as-devious offering thanksgiving sometimes, desperation more often; and the Goiti attacked first. walking kneelers going down the center aisle at glacial pace in the belief that the greater pain inflicted on the patella, the greater the The kingdom led by Soliman was pacified in short order. The heavenly gain. considerable Chinese community, which had already settled in Manila, proved more difficult to regulate. The new Spanish overlords The public square that lies outside Quiapo Church, known as Plaza confined these Chinese residents (whom they called Sangleys) into Miranda, features an unorganized market of hawkers selling a wide a ghetto known as Parian. Due to occasional Sangley revolts, the variety of herbs and potions, none of them coming with a seal of Parian would be destroyed then rebuilt in 1581, 1583, 1588, 1597, approval from a government regulatory agency, but each of which 1603, 1629, and 1642. After each pogrom, author Nick Joaquin comes with a guarantee of better health, if not bowel movements. It is an adventure to go to , which once was touted as the Manila isolated, ripe for the killing. Those who were trapped were local version of Hyde Park but now occupies the dingier subsection slaughtered where they stood, or herded into dank prison cells of the Dickensian universe. Two notorious acts of political violence or churches where they were slaughtered where they knelt. Even occurred at Plaza Miranda. In 1947, a barber hurled a grenade at a the President of the German Club was sliced with bayonets as he platform where President was delivering a speech. invoked the eternal friendship of Tojo and Hitler. While the Japanese A quick-thinking general kicked the yet-unexploded grenade from killed the people; the Americans destroyed the buildings with bombs. the stage onto the crowd; no one really remembers the name of The walled city of , once the heart of Spanish rule over the two people in the crowd who were killed by the resulting blast. the islands, ceased to exist after nearly four hundred years. Only In 1971, yet another grenade exploded during a political rally at one structure remained standing after the American bombs did their Plaza Miranda. This time there was no one to deflect the grenade, worst: San Agustin Church. It had been deliberately spared so that so several dignitaries were injured. All of the nine persons who died American G.I.s navigating through the ruined city would have one were killed offstage as they stood among the throng. visual point of reference that identified where they were. Today, San Agustin Church is the oldest surviving building in the Philippines. One of those injured in the 1971 was , then a Congressman opposed to the rule of President Immediately after the war, the newly independent Philippines, . The bomb cost Bagatsing one of his legs, but through its Congress, voted to build a great memorial that would helped gain him election that year as . Within a few commemorate the lives and legacies lost in February of 1945. No such years, Marcos had imposed rule by , with Bagatsing by memorial was ever built. The great , reconstructed now a Marcos stalwart who remained mayor of Manila until three just eighty years before, after the great 1863 earthquake, remained days after Marcos was ousted in 1986. Bagatsing remains the most for years a massive ruin. In time, refugees from much less massive prominent Filipino of Indian decent to achieve high political office. ruins rebuilt their lives within the rubbles of the church. They were His constituents, predictably, called him “Bumbay”; a nickname eventually driven out when they rebuilt the grand church, but they which he accepted with aplomb despite the racist overtones; relocated elsewhere in the city, bearing the same lack of hope. Filipinos have been calling émigrés from the Indian subcontinent Manila soon teemed with slums of the sort that was fodder for fund- “Bumbay” ever since the first Sepoys arrived in Manila, as part of raising appeals by humanitarian groups. Once, there was a grand the British invasion force that arrived in 1762. dame named Imelda who was seen fit to be installed as governor of Manila. Her solution to the slum problem was to build high walls It may come as a surprise to learn that for two years (1762-1764), that sheltered the informal settlers from the prying eyes of her jet- Manila formed part of the British Empire, an afterthought of the set friends such as George “Zorro the Gay Blade” Hamilton and Van Seven Year’s War. Manileños were unmoved; they continued with “Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1” Cliburn. afternoon siestas instead of high tea. The Spanish, though, were unnerved by the exposure of their vulnerability. After regaining Manila has more people now, in part because contraception is not Manila, they reorganized the city’s defenses, eliminating several readily available and public health advances now allow more people districts by relocating their population. Towns in Manila such as to live into their sixties. The slums remain, as with the rich and the Bagumbayan, San Juan and Santiago disappeared even from the aspirants to be rich. Manileños of vastly unequal states have come collective memory. together, as always, in an unsettled but necessary co-existence, not only with each other, but also with the ghosts of many more who, if The rest of Manila withstood several attempts at elimination. Almost given another stab, would have much preferred a life that was not every resident developed smallpox, and the survivors lived with unfair. the scars. There was a plague in 1628 and in 1645 and earthquake so catastrophic that hardly any buildings were left standing (The Spanish did not bother to record how many Filipinos had died in the quake). Another earthquake in 1863 destroyed the main cathedral and the Governor’s palace among others. The blow from which Manila nearly did not survive was the eponymous battle waged Oliver X.A. Reyes over it between the Americans and the Japanese invaders, in the closing months of the Second World War. The strategic destruction by the Japanese of key bridges left the most affluent districts of acknowledgements and credits Photos Tim Serrano words Irwin Cuz, OLIVER X.A. REYES CATALOGUE DESIGN AugGie fontanilla

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