Becoming Human in the Course of the Everyday

(Excerpt)

Marrying an artist marked the beginning of a lifelong fascination with portraits, landscapes and diagrams – appreciating details, spotting perfect vistas and engaging in academically-induced mental exercises.  Or maybe not.  Because our life is nothing exemplary.  We look forward to each waking morning and thankful for the previous night. We eat, work, play, laugh, cry, sleep.  We live.  Little did we know that the mundane in our everyday would lead to beautiful accidents and conscious life choices. 

Towards the Everyday and its Proper Places (Housework Museology and the Production of Oxygen) is an exercise in establishing the importance of rhythm in our lives.  Framing our existence as a subject/document/archive/exhibition allows the viewers a glimpse of the family’s individual and interweaving spaces.  This is our biography – zoomed-in from the ordinary housework and child rearing; to constant struggles and compromises with the society, paving the way for the bigger picture of art/life.  It is not something that we do every single day, but rather, this continuing project teaches us to detach and get disrupted from our everyday.  Disruptions that steer from breakouts to silence, which sequentially lead to assessment and even creativity.

Space/Place and the Essence of Memory. 

Space is the void where everything exists – it may be a vessel that carries our being, or a place wherein we negotiate to live.  The importance of space in establishing memories is essential for each individual.  As human beings, we tend to identify ourselves with our bodies – the vessel carrying our physical and spiritual faculties.  If we take care of our bodies, we take care of our personal space – we give importance to our being. 

Our existence is challenged every time we chose to interact.  What makes it hard for people to adapt is the notion of being too trapped to their personal spaces and the innate cultural influences.  Thus, it is our duty as adults to educate ourselves for self-development to be able to co-exist amicably with others.  We need to adjust our personal spaces to the communal places we opted to immerse. 

In 2006, the Jelo Submarine surfaced.  It was Buen and J Pacena II’s repository of robust emotions.  Raw, unapologetic, happy, romantic; this exhibit was a breather for both.  Since then, we have called our safe place, the Jelo Submarine – a comfort zone and a war zone altogether; it is a place for our sanity and respect for each other’s autonomy. 

The household environment plays a big part in taming or liberating individuals.  Once we lived together, we needed to be mindful of each other’s boundaries and work out the processes for a new life.  We breathe-in and take hold of what matters and breathe-out to release whatever we deem unimportant. 

Jocelyn T. Calubayan