Amiel Roldan: A Painter & A Curator ™

The Art of Repair  This essay reframes the grief that followed a young’s death into a concrete programmatic response: artmaking and craft-based practices as spearheads for individual healing, family repair, and civic reform. It argues that creative practices work simultaneously as therapeutic release, pedagogical tools, and infrastructures of communal accountability. Art does not replace clinical care or policy, but it functions as a strategic vector that surfaces hidden suffering, teaches relational skills, and catalyzes structural investment in mental health and caregiving capacity.  ---  From blame to practice  The public rush to assign blame after a youth’s death produces moral clarity but stalls remedial action. Artmaking dismantles that binary by converting moral performance into embodied practice. Where social media offers indictments, creative practices produce artifacts, sessions, and gatherings that require adult presence, skilled facilitation, and sustaine...

Teacher as Mirror of Life Accomplishments in the Face of Loss  The teacher-as-mirror metaphor often functions as a comforting image of pedagogical reciprocity: an educator reflects back a student’s efforts, shapes their sense of possibility, and bears witness to their becoming. When that mirror encounters depression, apathy, or the unthinkable outcome of a young person’s suicide, its surface trembles. The reflection it offers becomes simultaneously more urgent and more fraught. This essay moves between grief and theory, memory and policy, to argue that the teacher’s mirroring of life accomplishments—performed with ethical humility, narrative precision, and institutional support—can be a small but crucial counterforce to erasure, stigma, and isolation. It contends that mirroring must be both sentimental in its human tenderness and rigorous in its institutional accountability: sentimental enough to honor a student’s inner life, rigorous enough to catalyze concrete changes that sustai...

Introduction   The International Criminal Court’s concentrated attention on former President Rodrigo Duterte functions less as a straightforward mechanism of neutral accountability than as an institutionally performative gesture aimed at demonstrating impartiality. This pattern reveals an anxiety within global legal governance: to be seen as universal and legitimate the Court must show it can reach beyond Western capitals and prosecute leaders from the Global South. That performative imperative risks transforming accountability into a spectacle that reproduces colonial hierarchies under the veneer of legal technicality. This essay argues that the ICC’s posture toward Duterte exemplifies a juridical desperation that seeks a visible, racialized emblem of fairness, and that resisting the expansion of such a judicial empire requires legal, political, and epistemic interventions anchored in decolonial principles.  Historical and institutional context   International criminal l...

Argument for Culpability: Political Influence, Structural Risk, and the Case of the Maharlika Investment Fund  The available reporting establishes a credible factual core: the Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF) is a sovereign-structured vehicle that mobilizes government deposits into market and infrastructure investments; investigative outlets have alleged links between the fund’s inner circles and a convicted financier associated with a major sovereign fund scandal; and former House Speaker Martin Romualdez authored and lobbied for the MIF and has been publicly accused, and has publicly denied, any personal meetings or communications with that financier. These facts supply a legitimate analytic starting point for arguing that culpability—understanding that term as political, ethical, and institutional responsibility for foreseeable corruption risks and for possible corrupt outcomes—is both plausible and normatively significant. This essay advances a structured case for culpability ro...

Justice Unseen: Reevaluating the Merits of the Martires-Villanueva Reversal  Introduction  In democratic societies, justice must not only be done—it must be seen to be done. This axiom, foundational to public trust in institutions, was profoundly challenged by the silent reversal of a dismissal order against Senator Joel Villanueva by then-Ombudsman Samuel Martires in 2019. The reversal, which allegedly cleared Villanueva of administrative charges related to pork-barrel misuse, remained undisclosed for six years, surfacing only through media recollections in 2025. This essay reevaluates the merits of that decision—not merely its legal soundness, but its ethical, procedural, and democratic implications. It argues that the reversal’s secrecy undermines institutional integrity, corrodes public trust, and signals a dangerous normalization of opacity in governance.  I. The Context of the Reversal  In 2016, Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales ordered the dismissal of then-TE...