In
Return
Together,
the barter and the exhibition attempt to unearth the notions of value and
exchange that inform the dispositions of the community in facing the changes
being undergone by Lucban. Here, Dy moves from examining the discreet valuation
and bargaining between individuals to a proposed appraisal of the give-and-take
between an ostensibly agricultural way of life and the encroaching development
that accompanies its growth.
With
the barter process, Dy sought to thresh out the notion of exchange and its
attendant process of valuation among the participants. Employed as a discursive
lens, barter highlights the process of valuation by placing the familiar
measures of money at one remove. Bartering for a sack of rice, participants
sift through such criteria as gain and loss, frugality and generosity, or
equivalence and entitlement, at a more careful pace. The process differed for
each participant, whose wide sampling spans various social classes and
predispositions.
Within
the exhibition, Dy has placed a video and residual artifacts that document the
barter alongside cues that broaden the field of discussion. If the barter
initiated a re-examination of the process of valuation, the realities and
histories touched upon by the objects in the exhibition serve to complicate the
process. Whereas trading for an inelastic commodity like rice is pretty
straightforward, indeed some would give anything for it, here the prospects of
‘change,’ ‘development,’ and ‘progress’ are laden with tensions, apprehensions.
Altogether,
Dy has prompted two questions: by inviting participants to barter he asked, “How
do you value?” and by means of the exhibition he sues, “How will you value?”— he has initiated an inquiry
and issued a challenge.
The
same challenge extends to the exhibition insofar as embedded in the
participatory approach is a critique of the passive role of the audience. Thus,
by inviting the participatory turn with these questions, Dy has taken steps
towards a more meaningful engagement not only with personal or community-based
exchanges, but also with art practices. These, however remain provisional due
to the fact that the empowering capacity of participatory art draws less from
the token of participation but from devising situations that produce questions
that hew close to the source of disempowerment. In taking up the question of
valuation and appraisal, one needs to ask, “How have we come to value things
thus?”
One
limitation that hinders the project from raising and addressing such a question
thus far is the broad sampling and relatively brief consultation with the community.
This has left us with only a vague characterization of the ‘community’ and creates
an impression of an even distribution of dispositions. How many of us can
really decide on the value of goods? How decisive is a farmer’s voice in the
matter of development? Even further: Why should farmers have to barter their
shoes for rice, have they not given enough already? Why must they do so anyway?
Surely,
the project does not end here and there is yet ample time to broaden and deepen
the inquiry using means past an exhibition. Hopefully, this questioning will
expand so as to allow us to discern not only the values involved in the
exchanges that shape our personal and collective lives but also the structures
of exchange, its architecture, if you will, that set the terms of exchange, and
that more often than not are warped, privilege the few, and doom the rest to lives
of diminishing returns. n
Antares
Gomez Bartolome
Bartered and Bargained Thoughts
An Artist’s Statement
As
an artist-led platform that develops traditional, alternative and emerging art
approaches, Project Space Pilipinas (PSP) supports Barter as
a socially oriented and collaborative art project that I conceived and proposed
to its curatorial team led by director Leslie de Chavez and curator Jacqueline
Ali. I am generally interested in
attending to the changing religious and cultural circumstances, locations and
events through my community and studio based art practices. My current art
project is informed by socially engaged creative practices that
attempt to break away from conventional modes of art exchanges, i.e.
institutional and commercial, and to propose an alternate route of engaging
people who are at the peripheries of art discourse and interaction
(cf. Decter, 2014, pp. 16-17).
Barter has
evolved from the initial impression and commentary to the incongruous
government answer to the El Niño stricken Kidapawan farmers last 1
April 2016 (as hinted by the rice scooper created from cut down 6-pounder shell
casing, 57x306R, 1890s-WWI) to the specificity of PSP’s
exhibition space in Lucban as a site of multiple
encounters and exchanges with artists, curators and the local
community. The notion of barter though treated as a “myth” as well as
a “thought experiment” by several anthropologists who disagree that this kind
exchange of goods was a precursor of money as popularly posited by 18th century
Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (cf. Strauss, 2016), is proposed as a
discursive framework of reflecting on the multiplicity
of interactions of the site.
The
main feature of the art project is Practice of Bartering, an
off-site engagement with the community of Barangay Piis, Lucban,
Quezon. PSP, through de Chavez, has connected with the community in
collaboration with the local Barangay Council of Piis and with
his own paternal clan who were former residents of the said barangay. The PSP
team had facilitated outdoor painting workshops with the youth during the clan’s
annual Hagaran, an outreach program through sports and arts since
2010. After the ocular visit of the barangay, I intuitively saw the potential
of initiating a barter of rice grains with any objects chosen by the community
members. Some community members may respond to this invitation because rice is
their daily staple food. Others may be sceptical as why they need to
exchange almost one kilo of rice with any possessions they have. Even if I
offer limited editions of typewritten and signed Certificate of Sponsorship by
those who donated rice, some community members may still ask, “Why not just
give the rice for free when they were contributed by other artists,
galleries, collectors and project donors?” In this way, the community and I
will negotiate on the values of goods exchanged and discuss the
possibility/impossibility of a reciprocal interaction. A video documentation of
the process of bartering and recorded individual intentions of trading their
chosen objects with rice are displayed at the PSP gallery as well as
the bartered objects as artefacts of the engagement.
In
recent times, Lucban has found itself in the junction of emerging
transition from a rural, agricultural town to a municipality
of booming local enterprises supported by government infrastructure of new
road network at Lucban/Sampaloc Main Road as well as the sprouting
enclaves of residential subdivisions. In this context, I will attempt to
investigate the impact of the broader socio-economic development to
the individual, to group consciousness and to the capacity of communal
exchange of goods. The impact of this on-going development is captured by
the large digital print entitled Intersection of Contending Rural
Developments. It is a photograph of the main road before turning left to No.
6 Eleazar Street, the current location of PSP gallery.
Mt. Banahaw looms large from the distance witnessing the contending
rural developments at its foot characterized by the sturdy green growth of rice
seedling on its paddies as well as the mounds of earth to be used as
landfill for the road widening and a new route. As the set-up of the work Protected/Vulnerable
Agricultural Landscape suggests, the agricultural sector of the
community may assert its major contribution to its economic viability and as a
cultural referent to the annual Pahiyas Festival in
celebration of St. Isidore, patron saint of the farming community. They
are also keenly aware of a threat of land conversion into residential and
commercial zones. The exhibition looks into how a community like Lucban, will traverse
and contend with the repercussions of economic growth, the devices of
agricultural life, and the pertinency of cultural celebration of a bountiful
harvest and the artist’s attempt at repositioning barter as one of the lenses by
which we understand contemporary exchanges in art and society.
This
negotiation of goods entails the key issue of value according to the
London-based anthropologist David Graeber.
For Graerber (2013), the valuation of goods is important in
the social worlds “not just as a collection of persons and things but
rather as a project of mutual creation, as something collectively made and
remade.” However, in the barter mode of exchange like other modes of
contemporary exchanges, the values are uneven. How do partners reach a
consensus of meaningful exchange? Will it be from the mutuality
of needs, trust in the ethics of give-and-take, or the valuation
of gift-sharing that could be deceiving in circumstances of uneven power
distribution? How do they guard themselves of the danger of
perpetuating an uncontrollable world where only a few people profit well
from the exchange while the rest find unjust?
Adhering
to the observation noted by Graeber that in the conception
of production, after the ideas of German social philosophers Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, it (production) “always means the production
of material goods and social relations—and therefore, by extension, human
beings, who recreate themselves and each other in the very process of acting on the
world” (Graeber, 2013). In the exchange of produced goods for the
socio-economic growth of Lucban, social relations are vital for it
provides a space for mutual enrichment. Thus, it is important to be critical of
the relations of power to ensure this common welfare. To ensure that this
mutuality is promoted, together with the PSP team, we had an orientation with
the local community about the project, sought their consent in displaying the
bartered objects and their interview, provide them with infrastructure to visit
the exhibition space, and revisit them again to reflect together on the
experience of this project.
In this project, I look into the circumstances of those involved in the social
exchanges of a community confronting and reconciling the
changing landscape of their rural town. Dependent on the contextual standpoint,
the work Mound of Multiple Perspectives,
the half-mounds of unhusked rice grains and red earth linked together by a
double-sided mirror, impresses the possibility of multiple views. At one point,
the mound can be perceived as a whole and at another point, it is realized that
they are different from each other. In barter, values are arbitrary, the value
of objects up for exchange are dependent on who is giving the value.
Bibliography:
Decter, J. (2014) Culture in Action: Exhibition as Social
Redistribution. In: Decter, J.
and Draxler, H. Exhibition as Social Intervention: ‘Culture
in Action’ 1993. London: Afterall, pp. 14-43
Graeber, D. (2013) It is value that brings universes into
being. In: da Col, ed. Hau
Journal [online], 3(2), pp. 219-244. Available from:
[accessed 22 August 2016].
Strauss, L. (2016) The Myth of the Barter Economy. The Atlantic [online], 26
February. Available from:
[accessed 22 August 2016].
