hey so. i’ve been reading the tweets and posts about international clients dropping filipino artists and creators after the wake of the recent elections in the Philippines.
here’s why you shouldn’t do that.
the change of administration has next to no impact on a global scale. we are a tiny archipelago in the pacific, and we have nowhere near the kind of clout other asian countries like china and india have.
so what does this mean? in essence: there is literally no reason for anyone to stop commissioning filipino creators. the only thing that will happen when you do that is that you are hurting the creator. life is hard here. in a third world country like the Philippines, USD $1 is enough to purchase an entire meal. depriving a creator of even a single commission can be a significant blow to their income.
and it only gets worse. if you haven’t heard the news, the newly elected president is ferdinand “bongbong” marcos, jr., the son of the dictator that we ousted from power in 1986 through the EDSA people power revolutions that ended fourteen years of martial law. the newly elected vice president is sara duterte, the daughter of our incumbent president rodrigo duterte, known for his so-called “war on drugs”, which has in reality served as a permit for the police to slaughter filipinos wholesale under the guise of their being drug addicts or pushers.
now, you might be wondering how we got to this moment.
the answer is that there has been a massive effort at rewriting history in the Philippines ever since marcos was ousted.
pictured above: President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson and President and Mrs. Ferdinand Marcos at the White House
children are taught in school that martial law was the golden age of the country; that our economy and international relations were at their zenith; that art and culture thrived. today, social media has only served to perpetuate these lies. tiktokers and media influencers support the marcos family and their return to power and encourage people to do the same. many people have fallen victim to historical revisionism. i have family members who have been sending me marcos propaganda for weeks, trying to get me to vote for marcos. [dear reader, i would rather die.]
what people are not taught is that under martial law, blatant human rights atrocities were committed on an unimaginable scale.
let me tell you about a few of them:
archimedes trajano, who was then a college student, pissed off marcos’s eldest daughter at an open forum, and was dragged out, beaten, and subsequently killed.
extrajudicial killings were routine. [this was known as “salvaging”, from the filipino “salbahe”, or cruel, from the spanish “salvaje”, or savage.] if families were lucky, they’d find their desaparecidos loved one’s body in the river after a few weeks [hence, “salvaging”]. but many families never did. below are just a few of the people who have never been found.
red-tagging was also routine—this refers to the malicious blacklisting of individuals or organizations critical of the government. it basically serves as an excuse for them to pick you up and kill you if they decide they want you out of the picture.
and this is only the tip of the iceberg. it has been proven in three separate court cases that the marcoses robbed the country’s coffers of a staggering USD 685 million, or PHP 38 trillion. lord almighty. can you even try and picture that amount of money? i sure fucking can’t. and almost none of this money has ever been recovered. they are sitting in offshore accounts in switzerland and in imelda marcos’s extensive walk-in closet. [marcos’s widow owned 3,000 pairs of shoes. delusions of grandeur whomstve.]
so what does all this have to do with commissioning filipino artists?
what i’m trying to tell you is that filipinos are facing the very real possibility of history repeating itself. life is already hard now. it will only grow exponentially more terrible once the new administration is in the seat of power. we are living in a time of great unrest, and the last thing you need to do is to deprive an artist or a creator of their income at a time when they might need it the most.
i’m not an artist. you’re probably wondering why i’m even talking about this at all.
it’s because i am tired. i am terrified beyond words. i have been grieving for days, and i can barely wrap my head around the horror of it all. i am looking at an immediate future where martial law is completely wiped from the collective memory, where filipinos and internationals alike forget that these atrocities ever happened. that these atrocities are happening, even as i type this.
continue supporting filipino artists [thread here and here]. political art was one of the most effective ways we had to fight against martial law during the dictatorship.
download these documents about martial law and the marcos era, and read as much as you can. save them before they are erased. we don’t know how long it will take before they are gone—please don’t let them be lost.
a thread of movies and documentaries about the marcoses and the martial law that you can watch.
i don’t know what else to say. above all, this is an impassioned plea not to forget. we’re a tiny archipelago in the middle of the pacific. none of this will affect anyone but us. nobody fucking cares what happens to us, but i do. i care so much i can’t bear to leave, even though practically everyone around me is contemplating departing en masse.
if i am lucky, i will be proven wrong. i desperately want to be proven wrong. maybe this administration will turn out to be for the better. but history tells me that won’t be the case. this might be the only time i will be able to write anything like this—i’ve lived in fear of being red-tagged for two years now, and the chances of my getting red-tagged only continue to grow. i don’t know how much time i still have left to be able to talk about this openly, but i’m watching the sand running through the hourglass as we speak.
now, more than ever, we need you to look at what is happening to us. please don’t forget. don’t forget these things happened. don’t let them be erased. there may come a time that we might need you to remember for us, when the rest of the Philippines has already forgotten.
theartofmadeline
kianamaiart
annaxmalina
pixelskylines
jacobvanloon
