The Classroom as Temenos Undone: Residual Scripts, Kapwa’s Fracture, and the Unfinished Canvas of Philippine Social Realism
The Classroom as Temenos Undone: Residual Scripts, Kapwa’s Fracture, and the Unfinished Canvas of Philippine Social Realism Curatorial Frame I write this as an art practitioner who has spent years standing at the threshold of galleries and community halls in Manila, deciding what may enter the public eye and what must remain, for a time, protected. The role of gatekeeper is never neutral. It is a daily negotiation with *informed consent*—of the living, of the families still absorbing shock, of the dead who can no longer speak—and with the quieter, older law many of us still call *karmic*. What is sown in violence returns, not always as vengeance, but as the stubborn persistence of form. The 2026 cluster of school-linked shootings—Tacloban in June, Ateneo de Zamboanga in August, Banga National High School in South Cotabato on the afternoon of 18 September—has forced a new urgency upon that negotiation.¹ The school in the Philippine imaginary has long functioned as a modern *t...