Last Friday, April 26, saw the opening of the exhibit Dinadala in Makati City. Centering on the theme of labor and the struggle of workers, the exhibit features the works of artists Jether Amar, Ken Bautista, Faye Cura, Archie Oclos, and the late printmaker Neil Doloricon.
Dan Matutina, owner of Space63 in Comuna, Makati, was happy to provide the space for the exhibit, which runs until May 17. “It’s important that topics like the plight of Filipino workers are brought to a venue where diverse creative people frequent, like Comuna,” he told Rolling Stone Philippines. “The thinking is that visitors see and read these stories and can become important allies in amplifying voices that might otherwise go unheard.”
“Dinadala” curator Meg Yarcia also featured selected materials from the Philippine Labor Movement Archive (PLMA), the Institute for Occupational Health and Safety Development (IOHSAD), and the Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education and Research (EILER). These materials include loaned images, publications, and illustrations.
At the core of the exhibit is the concept of burden or “pagdadala,” which Yarcia considers relevant to Filipino workers who deal with “multiple heavy burdens in our kind of society.”
The exhibit succeeds in reflecting this, using art and materials that don’t just speak of the various experiences of Filipino workers in the country and abroad, but are also anchored to different points in the history of their struggle.
Yarcia told Rolling Stone Philippines that the PLMA had given her a box of images she found difficult to select from. “We featured those that represented the diversity of what workers bore: the weight of the day-to-day, anger, and grief, but most of all strength, courage, and hope,” she said.
For their part, IOHSAD provided Yarcia with newsletters from the 1990s to the aughts, which she said were revelatory for her. “Before this, I did not know that three workers died trying to build the MRT-3, that lead used to be a leading cause of workers’ illness, [or] that there used to be big campaigns around salmonella poisoning,” she said.
“We are where we are because decades ago, workers cared enough to forgo their day’s wages, risk their livelihood, and organize among communities to protest these issues so we could inherit a world that’s a little safer, a little more just,” Yarcia added.
Creative Production as Protest
Yarcia, who is also a psychologist, believes that creative production and labor respond to a social want. According to her, they are “opportunities for self-expression and actualization.”
“Labor in the usual sense produces the commodities we need in the day-to-day,” she explained. “But we also need arts and culture to survive.”
It is important to keep finding or creating opportunities to encourage and showcase creation among the working class and other marginalized sectors of our society, whose artistic voices exist and matter.
Citing German political thinker Karl Marx, Yarcia explained that both laborers and artists are prevented from “experiencing labor as self-expression, or a way towards the realization of their human potential” because they still have to respond to “the dictates of the inherently extractive, profit-oriented, and exploitative capitalist market.”
But she also emphasized that we don’t need to “wait for the downfall of capitalism” to make art — a point very well proven by “Dinadala.”
“It is important to keep finding or creating opportunities to encourage and showcase creation among the working class and other marginalized sectors of our society, whose artistic voices exist and matter,” she said. “We also want to keep building spaces that allow today’s artists to shun the demands of the market, and instead make art that truly further our understanding of the human condition. I believe that kind of cultural scene is worth fighting for.”
