Ode to Bobi V

 

 December 13, 2025

A concise remembrance: Today we honor Roberto “Bobi V” Valenzuela by weaving archival photographs and translated notes into an esoteric, academic ode that treats his curatorship as a form of ethical practice—one that tended artists, objects, and communities with the care of a keeper of memory. This essay uses the supplied photos and translated Filipino passages as premises to reflect on Valenzuela’s aesthetic ethics and cultural legacy. 

Remembrance Essay: Anselmo “Bobi V” Valenzuela 

Anselmo “Bobi V” Valenzuela’s curatorial practice can be read as a quiet pedagogy: a set of gestures that taught audiences how to look, and taught artists how to remain accountable to their materials and communities. Valenzuela’s work at Hiraya Gallery is often remembered as formative for a generation of Filipino artists, a role that positioned the gallery as both exhibition space and small museum of living practice. The photographs and handwritten notes provided here function as primary documents; treated together they form a constellation of testimony that allows an esoteric reading—one attentive to traces, margins, and the ethics of care. 

Photographs as Premises of Presence 

The portrait photograph—formal, frontal, and unadorned—operates as a locus of presence. In the logic of remembrance, a portrait is not merely likeness but a contract: it obliges viewers to hold a life in mind. The newspaper images of Valenzuela in the gallery, seated among works and captions, stage a curatorial posture: the curator as interlocutor between object and public. These images, when read alongside the gallery press clippings, suggest a practice that resisted spectacle and favored sustained attention. 

Translated Notes: Vernacular Ethics 

The supplied Filipino passages—translated and set as premises—reveal a curatorial philosophy grounded in humility and material respect. One handwritten line reads, in translation: “I do not kill trees!” This exclamation, when contextualized with a sculptor’s account of gathering fallen wood from the mountains, becomes an ethical maxim: to source without violence, to work with what has already been given by the land. Another passage recalls the gallery’s aspiration “to work with artists whose technical competence is equalled only by their dedication, sensitivity, honesty, seriousness, and devotion.” These are not mere programmatic statements; they are ethical criteria that shape curatorial selection and pedagogy. 

Curatorship as Care 

Esoterically, Valenzuela’s curatorship can be read through the trope of stewardship. The gallery becomes a site where responsibility—to borrow a favorite aphorism associated with his taste—translates into everyday practices: promoting young artists, resisting crude commercialism, and cultivating friendships across artistic communities. Curatorship here is not managerial but fiduciary: it holds trust on behalf of artists and publics. 

An Ode in the Mode of Quiet Witness 

On this death anniversary, the ode is not rhetorical flourish but a litany of small acts: arranging a show, translating a note, rescuing a fallen log for a sculptor’s hand, sitting with a visitor and listening. These acts accumulate into a life whose significance is not measured by spectacle but by the depth of its attentions. To remember Bobi V is to recommit to the slow work of care—of tending artists, objects, and the fragile ecosystems that sustain creative life. 

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Closing thought: Let the photographs and translated notes remain as active premises: not relics to be venerated, but prompts to continue the ethical labor Valenzuela modeled—to look, to translate, and to remain responsible to what we have tamed.