Mark Salvatus (b. 1980, Lucban, Philippines; based in Manila, Philippines)
"Araw na nakapitapita (That day most eagerly awaited)" 2020
Installation of curtain/backdrop, cutout paper texts, video, mural and drawing
Courtesy of the artist

Mark Salvatus’ That day most eagerly awaited presents and explores the home as a thriving ecology. The COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed our homes into spaces of shelter and confinement simultaneously shielding yet isolating us from the outside world. The work and its multiple components of video, archival materials, mural, and drawings largely take from a short story the artist’s grandfather published in a Philippine magazine in 1993 about a hermit and a golden bull that lived in Mount Banahaw in Quezon province in Luzon island.

From within the installation, you see the artist activating his home by constructing a view of the world from within its confines. He references his family’s archive to build a network of associations that span local history, folklore, communal yearnings and shared desires. Fusing his grandfather’s writings of fiction with stories of the Philippine revolution he remakes the home as a space that is timeless and without bounds. Through interwoven texts and materials, the work presents an encompassing view of a world remade through fiction and fantasy wherein locality is central and the folk becomes universal. This speaks to an agency forged by anticipation and a desire for transformation.

By Tessa Maria Guazon (based in Manila)