The Tariffed Image: Beds, Borders, and the Failure to Dream

The Tariffed Image: Beds, Borders, and the Failure to Dream 

Amiel Gerald A. Roldan 

In a world fevered by overproduction, surveillance, and saturation, refusal becomes a mode of insurgency. Blue Bed Series does not scream; it lingers. It does not march in formation; it sprawls—muted, spectral, and unresolved. Across the bleed of pigment and the opacity of brushstroke, what emerges is not simply a bed, but a visual cipher: a tender site of exhaustion, protest, and postcolonial rupture. If one reads the global temperature today—failed peace talks, institutional complicity, and the commodification of cultural labor—then the blue bed ceases to be a symbol. It becomes a threshold. This essay threads the implications of that threshold, situating the series as a speculative archive of refusal, a ghost in the algorithmic machine of institutional representation, and a counter-map to the war-torn imagination of our time. 

--- 

I. Refusal as Aesthetic Methodology 

The imperative of visibility looms large in contemporary art, particularly in the postcolonial South. Cultural workers are compelled to perform not just productivity, but creativity—a term increasingly weaponized by institutions eager to extract novelty without attending to the systemic fatigue beneath it. In titling the social media post “Cultural Workers Are Not Creative?”, the artist does not seek validation. Instead, the phrase operates as détournement, folding the institutional frame back into the image’s critical infrastructure. 

Here, the bed figures not as a domestic relic but as a volatile psychic architecture. It is the place where the cultural worker, overtaxed by aesthetic demand, temporarily disappears. Saturated in cerulean melancholia, the beds neither beckon comfort nor promise clarity. They traffic in withdrawal. Drawing from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, they function as dream-residues, screens that conceal as much as they reveal. There is no master-narrative here—only fragments, slippages, and hauntings. 

Marx’s theory of alienated labor reverberates, not through factory smoke but through pigments that refuse to cohere. The modern cultural worker, particularly in the Global South, is subject to relentless abstraction: their labor aestheticized, their fatigue curated. The Blue Bed Series enacts a refusal of this cycle, proposing rest not as recovery, but as resistance. 

--- 

II. Institutional Spectacle and the Tariffed Image 

In a moment where museums have become brand ecosystems and biennials are geopolitical soft power mechanisms, the representation of art is no longer neutral—if it ever was. The insertion of Blue Bed Series into the feed of a corporate-adjacent museum in Iloilo dramatizes this contradiction. The bed, typically a private site, is now deployed as spectacle. But this is a spectacle of absence, not affirmation. 

If Trumpian cultural strategy relies on hyper-visibility, assertive iconography, and symbolic border-making (walls, tariffs, travel bans), then Blue Bed Series offers a counter-aesthetic: spectrality, withdrawal, and affective opacity. The bed cannot be consumed easily; it resists branding. It demands contemplation, not clicks. 

Economic nationalism, as revived under Trump and echoed in similar populist regimes globally, commodifies identity while restricting mobility. Art becomes both product and passport—an object subject to valuation, circulation, and extraction. In this context, the bed becomes a tariffed object. It levies a cost—not financial, but psychic. What it reveals is not content, but condition. Not representation, but exhaustion. 

The deliberate deployment of ambiguous blue across the series anchors this critique. Blue is melancholic, yes—but also bureaucratic, institutional, imperial. Think NATO blue, UN blue, Facebook blue. It is both soothing and surveilling, domestic and diplomatic. These beds are not dreams—they are dossiers. 

--- 

III. War and the Architecture of Collapse 

To address the current war—the unraveling of diplomacy between the United States and Iran, exacerbated by Israeli instigation—is to confront representation at its most dangerous. Trump’s ultimatum in the failed Rome peace talks, Israel’s aerial bombardment, and Iran’s symbolic countermeasures form a triangulated spectacle of collapse. This collapse is not just political—it is aesthetic. Images of destruction, precision strikes, and press statements become part of the global media machine. Art, in this context, becomes either complicit or resistant. 

Blue Bed Series resists—not by depicting war, but by staging its residue. The absence of bodies becomes a commentary on erasure. Where are the fatigued cultural workers, the displaced artists, the ghosted identities? They are here, in pigment and blur, folded into the linen of collective trauma. 

In speculative hindsight, these beds could be mistaken for diplomatic chambers—rooms where ceasefires failed, where peace collapsed into posture. They become post-conflict sites. No longer archives of desire, they are necroarchives—curating the failures of human empathy and geopolitical imagination. 

--- 

IV. Filipino Cultural Labor and the Dream of Visibility 

To be a Filipino cultural worker today is to dwell in paradox: hyper-visible in diasporic performance economies, yet underrepresented in global art markets; essentialized by Western curators, yet erased by national funding bodies. In this context, Blue Bed Series becomes a mnemonic device—not for nostalgia, but for pagod: deep, untranslatable fatigue that reverberates across generations. 

Rendered in layers of thick, indistinct brushwork, these beds align with pasma—a somatic and aesthetic language where overexertion leads to rupture. Pasma here is not just bodily dissonance; it is a political condition. A condition born of overwork, underpayment, and the endless extraction of “Filipino resilience” as aesthetic capital. The paintings do not ask for empathy; they demand a new gaze—one that sees cultural labor not as spectacle, but as wound. 

Drawing from Filipino art histories, one might place this series beside the objects of Norberto Roldan or the psychic cartographies of Lena Cobangbang. Yet unlike these predecessors, Blue Bed Series dissolves figuration entirely, floating in a speculative elsewhere—perhaps what José Esteban Muñoz calls a “queer utopia”: not-yet-here, but fiercely possible. 

--- 

V. Speculation as Counter-Diplomacy 

In speculative theory, especially within the aesthetics of withdrawal and opacity, the refusal to clarify becomes itself an act of liberation. Blue Bed Series does not document reality—it reconfigures it. This is not abstraction for its own sake; it is a reorientation of the gaze. 

If diplomacy has failed—if peace talks morph into ultimatums, and cultural workers are reduced to slogans—then perhaps only speculative art can offer us another grammar. Not solution, but suspension. Not treaties, but thresholds. 

The beds do not negotiate; they dream. And in doing so, they sketch the outlines of a world not yet beholden to metrics, likes, or missiles. They perform what the war rooms and boardrooms cannot: they hold space. 

--- 

VI. Toward a Counter-Archive 

Let us then imagine Blue Bed Series not just as a body of work, but as an evolving archive. An archive that resists curation, resists interpretation, resists even coherence. It is not concerned with being understood—it is concerned with undoing the conditions that make certain forms of art legible and others expendable. 

In this speculative archive, the artist is not a producer but a witness. The bed is not a set piece, but a palimpsest. The blue is not color, but condition. Every blurred edge, every submerged detail is an indictment—not of viewers, but of systems. Systems that ask artists to perform without sleep, to aestheticize their wounds, to produce hope on cue. 

Blue Bed Series refuses all that. It turns its back, lies down, and listens. 

--- 

Epilogue: On Not Dreaming 

This essay does not conclude; it pauses. Just as the beds in Blue Bed Series remain unoccupied, so too must we refuse closure. The failure of U.S. diplomacy, the theatrics of Israeli militarism, the haunting collapse of cultural funding, the algorithmic reshaping of representation—all these phenomena require more than analysis. They require rest. They require refusal. They require, perhaps, the impossible luxury of sleep. 

In this, the artist offers no resolution. Only blue. Only beds. Only the stillness before the next demand. 

---