Salt is the threshold of the body. The Whitest Gold is a personal articulation of the delineation between labor and work when it comes to Mariano Batocabe’s practice as an artist: the physical act of labor, including its physical and economic toll, is done in order to do work. However, work is not necessarily labor.
These notions stem from being situated in Las Piñas, a city founded on salt beds, and a historically crucial trade route from Laguna de Bay to Manila. The wide, mirrored fields of Manila’s southern coast are now a sight of the past, now replaced with a new form of currency in the form of concrete conduits that unceremoniously shuffle people to the belly of the beast and back.
The history of the center runs parallel to the histories of the fringes, where locales find themselves geographically close to the nexus of commerce, culture, and governance, but rendered nearly inaccessible by standstill thoroughfares and urban neglect.
Unlike other forms of legal tender, however, salt is vital to the human body. It’s an underlying element of each contraction of muscle, however minute. It is also a mark of labor: the remnant of sweat. Likewise, mark-making leaves the evidence of movement; it’s proof of intention to create an object. It begins as a mark, and the cumulative mass of particles can change a landscape.
Batocabe’s works approach marking as a fundamental act, and a process in itself. The procedure of drawing is rendered meditative, fluid, and intuitive. Sometimes the movement predates articulation in words, but it is nonetheless a movement. It records presence, which is both the agent and aftermath of being.
After all, each bodily maneuver still operates in respect to metabolism, governed by cold, hard physiology—even Judas’ greeting to the devil. To throw salt over one’s shoulder in this day and age remains a dusty superstition. But that very gesture, back when salt was the whitest gold, could only be afforded by a madman or a king. — Mariah Reodica
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