The Ecosystem That Floods Itself: Curatorial Recursions on Davao’s Epicenter and the Counter-Visibility of Philippine Art
The Ecosystem That Floods Itself: Curatorial Recursions on Davao’s Epicenter and the Counter-Visibility of Philippine Art
Curatorial Frame
As an art practitioner who has spent years deciding what enters the white cube and what is left in the weather, and as a cultural worker who has watched institutions metabolize critique into grant language, I approach the 25 August 2026 remarks of Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla with the same mixture of professional suspicion and reluctant fascination that I bring to a poorly lit artist’s studio at 11 p.m. Remulla, speaking before the House Committee on Appropriations while requesting ₱7.232 billion for the Office of the Ombudsman in Fiscal Year 2027, described Davao City as the “epicenter of flood control” before the Marcos administration and named an “ecosystem” into which substantial public funds had allegedly flowed. He clarified, with the careful speed of a man who knows how quickly a metaphor can be weaponized, that this was not yet a conclusion of corruption’s geographic heart. Evidence, he insisted, must still be verified on the ground.¹
The statement is already a curatorial object. It arrives pre-framed by the architecture of a budget hearing, by the fluorescent lights of the Batasang Pambansa, by the simultaneous presence of lawmakers who have themselves inserted projects into the very appropriations under discussion. My task is not to litigate the legal claims—that belongs to prosecutors and, eventually, to the Sandiganbayan—but to ask what kind of exhibition this ecosystem produces, and what kind of counter-exhibition Philippine art has been assembling in its shadow.
I begin anecdotally, because curation without anecdote becomes theology. In September 2025, at the Mindanao Art Festival in Davao itself, three artists from Caraga—Gualberto Licong, Alwin Musa, and Ariel Sitoy—installed a 20-kilo fragment of concrete and rebar under the title *This is Where Your Taxes Go*. The fragment had been taken from an actual government project site. Its label mimicked the standard DPWH program-of-work signage, except that the project cost was listed as the nation’s ₱17.27-trillion debt. The parody logo was almost tender in its precision. Visitors walked around it the way one walks around a body in a morgue: with a mixture of curiosity and the guilty hope that it is not someone one knows.² The work is neither subtle nor particularly beautiful. It is, however, exact. It converts the abstract metabolism of appropriation into an object that can be tripped over.
This is the first support node I isolate: the capacity of material residue to short-circuit bureaucratic language. The political ecosystem thrives on the gap between allocation and verification, between the line item and the riverbank. Art that simply returns the object—cement that was meant to hold water, now holding only debt—performs a kind of forensic tenderness.
Yet the same installation also generates its resistance node. Once the fragment enters the festival, it becomes available for the very circuits of cultural capital that festivals are designed to accelerate. Photographs circulate; the artists are invited to panels; the work risks becoming a tasteful illustration of a problem whose structural conditions remain untouched. The ecosystem, one begins to suspect, is perfectly capable of absorbing its own critique as long as the critique arrives in the form of an exhibition.
I turn now to the broader field. Photojournalist Jilson Tiu has spent years photographing Filipinos standing in floodwater with a composure that refuses both pity and triumph. His images do not shout; they simply refuse to look away from the ordinary body that has been asked, yet again, to absorb the consequences of extraordinary malfeasance.³ Ryard Josh Adorabl’s painting *Pasanin ng Bayan* places a crocodile-headed figure in a barong atop a crowd of ordinary people; the inversion is almost pedagogical in its clarity. Digital artist Tarantadong Kalbo produces a steady stream of moderate-to-libertarian cartoons that treat the flood-control scandal as a series of civic exercises rather than apocalyptic revelations.⁴ Protest songs—“Bulsa,” “Tax ng Ina Mo,” the revived “Upuan”—move through the same channels with the speed of water finding the lowest point.
What unites these practices is not a shared ideology but a shared refusal of opacity. The political ecosystem depends on the difficulty of penetration that Remulla himself named: people who will not speak, networks that reconstitute after every exposure. Art, in its better moments, manufactures speakers where silence has been enforced. It does so, however, under conditions that are themselves compromised. The artist who accepts a grant from an agency whose sister agency is under investigation, the curator who programs “socially engaged” work while the museum’s board includes contractors, the cultural worker who translates rage into a carefully moderated panel discussion—all of us are already inside the recursive loop.
Here the humor becomes necessary, if only as survival. There is something almost comic in the spectacle of a budget hearing in which the very institution tasked with investigating anomalous flood-control spending must itself request more money for marshals and office space so that it can investigate more effectively. It is as if the body, having discovered a tumor, decides that the best treatment is to grow larger so that it can better study the tumor. The irony is not lost on anyone who has ever written a project proposal. We are all, in our small ways, requesting additional funds to study the systems that require additional funds.
The poignant register arrives when one remembers that the floods continue. While the hearing proceeds and the installation is photographed and the songs are streamed, water still rises in the same barangays whose projects were flagged years earlier. The bodies in Tiu’s photographs are not metaphors; they are people who will sleep tonight with damp floors and the knowledge that the concrete that was supposed to protect them may never have been poured, or was poured in the wrong place, or was poured and then quietly allowed to crack.
As gatekeeper I must decide what belongs in the frame. I include the Remulla statement not because it is conclusive but because it is diagnostic: it names the difficulty of penetration while performing the act of penetration. I include the Caraga installation because it returns matter to discourse. I include the photographs and the songs because they keep the human cost from dissolving into the language of “pattern analysis.” I exclude, for the moment, the triumphant narratives of institutional reform that have not yet demonstrated their capacity to outrun the ecosystem’s adaptive speed.
Support node of this frame: the persistent capacity of Philippine art to manufacture visibility under conditions designed to suppress it.
Resistance node: the equal capacity of the political and cultural ecosystems to metabolize that visibility into further resilience, turning critique into content and content into career.
The frame remains open. The water has not receded.
Disconfirmation of the Alternative
The alternative premise runs roughly as follows: that the flood-control ecosystem is either (a) a series of isolated anomalies correctly being addressed by the very institutions now investigating them, or (b) a problem so thoroughly systemic that aesthetic intervention is at best decorative and at worst a distraction from “real” political work. Both versions fail on their merits.
Version (a) cannot account for the recursive character of the data. The same patterns—overlapping contracts, double funding, incomplete works tagged complete, heavy concentrations of insertions in particular districts—appear across administrations and across regions. The clarification that Davao is not yet declared the “epicenter of corruption” is procedurally correct and politically prudent, yet it also functions as an immunological response: by refusing premature conclusion, the system preserves the possibility of selective conclusion later. The alternative that trusts institutional self-correction therefore underestimates the ecosystem’s demonstrated capacity to reconstitute itself after each exposure.
Version (b) fails by underestimating the material force of visibility. The Caraga installation does not pass legislation; it does, however, make the abstract concrete in a literal sense. The photographs do not prosecute; they make it harder for the public to pretend that the human cost is theoretical. Art is not a substitute for accountability; it is one of the conditions under which accountability becomes imaginable. To dismiss it as distraction is to accept the very opacity that the ecosystem requires.
Support node of the disconfirmation: the empirical persistence of pattern across time and the documented force of aesthetic objects in public discourse.
Resistance node: the risk that the disconfirmation itself becomes another curatorial performance, elegant and ultimately contained.
Curatorial Narrative Critiquing
The exhibition I am imagining does not yet exist, which is precisely why it must be described. It would open with the Remulla transcript projected at reading height, the language of “ecosystem” and “epicenter” allowed to stand without immediate interpretation. Beside it, the Caraga fragment, still smelling faintly of the site from which it was taken. The label would be left as the artists made it—debt as project cost—because any curatorial gloss would dilute the precision.
In the next room, a grid of Tiu’s photographs, uncaptioned except for location and date. The absence of explanatory text is deliberate: the bodies already explain. On the opposite wall, a continuous loop of the protest songs, their lyrics scrolling in Tagalog and English so that the visitor cannot escape the vernacular force of the complaint. Adorabl’s crocodile-headed figure would occupy a single wall, large enough that the crowd beneath it becomes a mirror for the viewers themselves.
The critique is structural. Most institutional responses to the flood-control scandal have treated art as illustration or as “awareness-raising.” This narrative rejects both. Illustration assumes that the problem is lack of information; the problem is the organized production of non-information. Awareness-raising assumes that once the public knows, the system will correct; the system has already demonstrated that knowledge can be metabolized without correction.
Instead, the exhibition treats art as a competing metabolism. Where the political ecosystem converts public funds into private resilience, the aesthetic ecosystem converts private and collective rage into public objects that refuse to disappear. The risk, of course, is that the museum itself becomes another node in the larger ecosystem—another place where critique is safely displayed while the riverbanks remain unfinished. The curatorial counter-move is therefore to keep the exhibition provisional, to refuse permanent collection status for the most forensic works, to insist that the objects remain available for future re-use in non-institutional settings.
Support node: the capacity of carefully framed aesthetic objects to interrupt the smooth circulation of official language.
Resistance node: the museum’s own appetite for the very controversy that justifies its programming budget.
Expanded Summative
We return, recursively, to the beginning. Remulla’s statement of 25 August 2026 names an ecosystem whose weight is difficult to penetrate. Philippine art, in the years immediately preceding and following that statement, has been engaged in the parallel work of manufacturing penetrable surfaces. The Caraga installation, Tiu’s photographs, Adorabl’s inversion, Kalbo’s cartoons, and the circulating songs form a counter-ecosystem whose resilience lies precisely in its refusal of single authorship or single institution.
The in-depth conclusion is neither optimistic nor despairing. The political ecosystem has not been dismantled; it has been mapped with greater precision. The artistic counter-ecosystem has not seized power; it has made the seizure of power by the same old networks slightly more expensive in reputational terms. Between them stands the public that continues to live with the water.
The relation is recursive rather than linear. Each exposure produces new forms of adaptation; each adaptation produces new forms of exposure. The digital progression described in earlier nodes—0 to 1 to 01 to 10 to 11—continues. The only honest curatorial stance is to keep the frame open long enough for the next iteration to appear, and to refuse the comfort of declaring any single iteration conclusive.
Support node of the summative: the documented accumulation of aesthetic force against systemic opacity.
Resistance node: the equal accumulation of institutional and political techniques for absorbing that force.
The water has not receded. The work continues.
Footnotes
¹ Jesus Crispin Remulla, statement before the House Committee on Appropriations, 25 August 2026, as reported in Manila Bulletin, “Remulla calls Davao ‘epicenter of flood control’—but changes tone quickly after,” 25 August 2026.
² Gualberto Licong, Alwin Musa, and Ariel Sitoy, *This is Where Your Taxes Go*, installation, Mindanao Art Festival, Davao City, September 2025; see Manila Bulletin, “Art depicting anomalous flood control projects gets a thumbs up,” 25 September 2025.
³ Jilson Tiu, photographic series on flooding and infrastructure failure, 2024–2026; discussed in Art+ Magazine, “Empty Promises, Flooded Proofs,” 1 October 2025.
⁴ Ryard Josh Adorabl, *Pasanin ng Bayan*, 2025; Tarantadong Kalbo, digital works on flood-control issues, July–October 2025; analyzed in DLSU Senior High School Research Congress proceedings, 2026.
Sources and References (Chicago Style)
Adorabl, Ryard Josh. *Pasanin ng Bayan*. Painting, 2025.
Art+ Magazine. “Empty Promises, Flooded Proofs.” October 1, 2025. https://artplus.ph/features/empty-promises-flooded-proofs.
Licong, Gualberto, Alwin Musa, and Ariel Sitoy. *This is Where Your Taxes Go*. Installation. Mindanao Art Festival, Davao City, September 2025.
Manila Bulletin. “Art depicting anomalous flood control projects gets a thumbs up.” September 25, 2025. https://mb.com.ph/2025/09/25/art-depicting-anomalous-flood-control-projects-gets-a-thumbs-up.
Manila Bulletin. “Remulla calls Davao ‘epicenter of flood control’—but changes tone quickly after.” August 25, 2026. https://mb.com.ph/2026/08/25/remulla-calls-davao-epicenter-of-flood-control-but-changes-tone-quickly-after.
Rappler. “Ombudsman seeks P7.23-billion budget for 2027.” August 25, 2026. https://www.rappler.com/philippines/ombudsman-2027-proposed-budget/.
Tinio, Antonio. Letter to Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla regarding Davao flood-control contracts, May 19, 2026. Reported in GMA News Online and Rappler.
Tiu, Jilson. Photographic works on flooding and public infrastructure. 2024–2026.
Additional primary reporting drawn from Inquirer, Philstar, Mindanews, and House Committee on Appropriations hearing records, August 2026.
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™' s connection to the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) serves as a defining pillar of his professional journey, most recently celebrated through the launch of the ACC Global Alumni Network.As a 2003 Starr Foundation Grantee, Roldan participated in a transformative ten-month fellowship in the United States. This opportunity allowed him to observe contemporary art movements, engage with an international community of artists and curators, and develop a new body of work that bridges local and global perspectives.Featured Work: Bridges Beyond Borders His featured work, Bridges Beyond Borders: ACC's Global Cultural Collaboration, has been chosen as the visual identity for the newly launched ACC Global Alumni Network.Symbol of Connection: The piece represents a private collaborative space designed to unite over 6,000 ACC alumni across various disciplines and regions.Artistic Vision: The work embodies the ACC's core mission of advancing international dialogue and cultural exchange to foster a more harmonious world.Legacy of Excellence: By serving as the face of this initiative, Roldan's art highlights the enduring impact of the ACC fellowship on his career and his role in the global artistic community.Just featured at https://www.pressenza.com/2026/01/the-asian-cultural-council-global-alumni-network-amiel-gerald-a-roldan/
He is a Filipino multidisciplinary visual artist, printmaker, painter, independent curator, researcher, writer, and cultural worker whose practice spans contemporary art, curatorial work, and cultural advocacy. He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.
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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.His practice appears to represent several interconnected concerns:
Cultural work as artistic practice. Roldan has argued that the labor of curating, organizing exhibitions, teaching, documentation, and cultural administration should be understood as creative work rather than merely support work. This perspective has been reflected in his writings and exhibitions.
Social and political engagement. His artworks frequently address politics, religion, faith, denial, courage, social inequality, and the everyday experiences of Filipinos. He has stated that he draws inspiration from Filipino cultural practices while approaching painting, printmaking, and installation from a conceptual perspective.Printmaking and conceptual art.Roldan is particularly recognized for his printmaking, with works shown internationally, including exhibitions in Japan and France. His practice also encompasses painting, photography, installation, and curatorial research.International cultural exchange. A significant milestone in his career was receiving an Asian Cultural Council fellowship in 2003, which enabled him to undertake research and create work in the United States while engaging with artists and curators internationally.
More broadly, Roldan's work represents an attempt to bridge artistic production, curatorial practice, scholarship, and cultural activism . His writings often emphasize postcolonial discourse, cultural memory, and the ethics of artistic collaboration, positioning the artist not only as a maker of objects but also as a builder of cultural infrastructure.
In the Philippine contemporary art context, he can be understood as representing the figure of the artist-curator-cultural worker —someone who contributes both through making artworks and through developing exhibitions, mentoring artists, and fostering institutional and independent cultural initiatives.
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