Pasma: A Curatorial Voice

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Exhibition Overview 

Blue Bed Series


Artist: Amiel Gerald A. Roldan  

Medium: Mixed-media paintings and generative image studies  

Curatorial Framework: Cultural labor, institutional critique, global precarity  

Organized by: [Institution Name / Curatorial Body] 


The Blue Bed Series is a contemplative body of work that explores affective fatigue, institutional framing, and the psychic residue of cultural labor. Through repeated depictions of beds rendered in saturated tonal registers, predominantly blue, the series stages a formal and conceptual withdrawal from normative structures of visibility and productivity. By circulating these images across institutional channels, the artist highlights the tension between aesthetics and exhaustion—foregrounding the fatigue of cultural labor within both regional and transnational art economies. 


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Curatorial Statement 


Roldan's Blue Bed Series articulates a critical response to the cultural worker’s position within postcolonial creative industries. By repurposing the bed as an iconographic and affective site, the work enacts what Édouard Glissant terms an “aesthetics of opacity”—a refusal of hyper-visibility and institutional legibility. The choice to foreground sleep, or its absence, serves as a visual grammar of dissent. Rest is framed not as retreat, but as interruption. Silence, as an ethics of refusal. 


The artist’s provocation—“Cultural Workers Are Not Creative?”—originated from an institutional caption and is here transposed into a conceptual critique. Embedded within the imagery is a speculative engagement with ongoing failures of diplomacy and the entanglement of cultural capital within global unrest, particularly reflecting on U.S.–Iran negotiations and Israel's strategic positioning as extensions of soft power spectacle. 


Within this framework, the artist interrogates the mechanisms by which labor is aestheticized and the artist’s subjectivity rendered as productive commodity. The bed is not a figure of domesticity—it is deployed as a counter-monument to overexposure and instrumentalization. 


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Funding Proposal Summary (Institutional Format) 


Project Title: Blue Bed Series  

Institution: [Your Museum / Organization]  

Artist: Amiel Gerald A. Roldan  

Length: 10-week exhibition with accompanying publication and digital extensions  

Request: [Funding amount], covering installation, interpretive materials, and artist fee 


Project Objectives:  

- Exhibit a speculative body of work exploring aesthetic withdrawal and institutional critique  

- Interrogate affective labor in contemporary artistic production through critical iconography  

- Catalyze public discourse on Filipino cultural narratives, representation, and global precarity 


Academic & Cultural Relevance:  

This proposal situates Roldan’s work within emergent discourses in political aesthetics and global curatorial practice. Informed by Marxian critiques of labor, Freudian dream residue, and Southeast Asian vernacular epistemologies, the exhibition engages urgent questions around visibility, representation, and the role of soft power in the circulation of art. The exhibition will include didactic materials, a companion essay on pasma as a critical lexicon of rupture, and a curatorial audio guide. 


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Supplemental Catalogue Essay 


Pasma as Critical Lexicon: From Somatic Tremor to Aesthetic Strategy 


In the lexicon of Filipino folk somatics, pasma denotes a state of tremor caused by thermal contradiction: when exhausted flesh touches cold surface, the body misfires. While dismissed in biomedical literature, pasma offers a compelling entry point into the aesthetics of collapse—especially in Roldan’s Blue Bed Series, where tremor, blur, and spectral pigment form a language of unresolved fatigue. 


As a conceptual gesture, pasma functions as more than metaphor. It materializes a social condition: the condition of cultural labor under demand, of bodies asked to perform care while structurally denied rest. If Western art historical discourse privileges sublimity or abjection, pasma offers an alternative mode—one rooted in labor, imbalance, and vernacular refusal. 


Blue Bed Series does not represent pasma; it enacts it. The bed surfaces shiver, not from cold, but from historical weight. In staging this rupture, Roldan elevates pasma from superstition to speculative epistemology—a critical grammar of exhaustion, survival, and aesthetic interruption. 


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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 21, 2025


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