A Curatorial Statement

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Curatorial Statement: Clotting Futures: Echoes from the Soft Catastrophe

by Amiel Gerald A Roldan


In a world sliding between memory and militarism, Clotting Futures brings together artistic responses to the spectral afterlives of imperial choreography. This exhibition emerges from the current conjuncture of geopolitical escalation—where Israel, the United States, Iran, and their global counterparts rehearse a crisis as old as modernity itself. Yet what is offered here is not reaction but rupture: an exploration of geopolitical trauma, aesthetic residue, and the speculative labor of refusal.


Rooted in Filipino vernacular epistemologies and trauma-informed pedagogy, this body of work reframes war not as a singular event but as a persistent atmospheric condition—a soft catastrophe. Here, clotting operates as both wound and methodology: a lexical intervention that resists resolution, refuses linearity, and coagulates collective pain into radical form.


Visitors move through zones of temporal distortion: archival fictions are staged as sculptural memory-acts; geopolitical maps bleed into topographies of affect; pedagogical interventions unfold as annotated grief. Each gesture interrogates sovereignty as performance, asking: What remains when power is only visible as spectacle? What persists when futures are fought over through proxies and pixels?


The exhibition is not an answer—it is an encounter. One where the artist’s labor becomes a testament to haunted sovereignties and the unclaimed debris of empire. In the aesthetics of clotting, we find not closure, but a dense, vital pause—thick with the possibility of another grammar.


Welcome to the clot. Welcome to the residue of what refuses to be forgotten.




I'm trying to complement my writings with helpful inputs from AI through writing. Bear with me as I am treating this blog as repositories and drafts. 


Amiel Gerald Roldan

June 23, 2025


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