Mideo M. Cruz’ Cyborg Republic

July 4-25, 2015

Blanc Gallery
145 Katipunan Avenue, St. Ignatius Village, Quezon City 1110
+63920-9276436, +632-4425262 | info@blanc.ph

Relics Of Our Discontent

The fictional character who is part-human, part-machine, with the fundamentals of heart and soul, the one that global Hollywood cinema feeds the world, is expectedly what dominates the discourse of cyborgs. The human who functions as machine, who is machine, is premise and by-product of capitalism that treats human as mere number, faceless and nameless, replaceable parts of the production machine.

It is labor as manipulated with impunity by capital that turns humans into cyborgs, demanding of them heartlessness, reconfiguring their minds to accept normalized suffering, bound as it is to notions of faith and consumption. You do not eat the hand that feeds you, you are fed the crap that you make yourself.

This is the state of the Cyborg Republic, where the human-robot is not stuff of fiction, as it is part of the national narrative of labor oppression. It lives off subplots of greener pastures and remittance contributions, and for many move towards the (anti-)climax set in the airconditioned halls of transnational work as developmental touchstones. The humans and robots this narrative creates, the symbols of its ideology, are in this exhibit.

Familiar heads are pegged onto uncannily proportioned and apportioned bodies. Symbols are disfigured and reconstructed, standing now for the real gods that control our fate. Fairytale characters and mascots of global capital are revealed for their eerie fake smiles that cloak the violence inherent to their existence. Found objects as excesses of capital, are bound together into becoming the relics of our discontent, of our becoming. In this republic, the state of being human at this historical juncture and in this context is revealed, and it is a mirror of our luck and doom, our outcome and destiny.

Disfigurement, mutilation, defacement are not promises that development make. Its violent by-products of excess and exclusion, consumption and consumerism are ones that it successfully erases by owning information, funneling capital into controling how we might critique the current state of affairs – an effective strategy if we are to base it on the silences we keep about our own suffering.

Yet the mere existence of this Cyborg Republic reveals the possibilities for various forms of transgression and resistance, where the reconfiguration of one’s humanity does not obliterate the impetus for critique, the imperative of rebellion. And within the landscape of the crisis of contemporary art as bound to capital and market, to questions of artists’ welfare and rights, to artistry and creativity that is pegged on auctions and sales, right here is also the artist’s own narrative of community, as lived and not imagined, as reflection and not fiction.

Here, the artist and worker are one and the same: cyborgs manufactured by nation and transnational capital. We are all relics of our own discontent.