Between Numbers and Narratives: Speculative Readings of Surveillance Data in Postcolonial Contexts
An essay that threads data interpretation with broader cultural and epistemic inquiries. It draws upon Amiel Roldan practice’s interest in cultural memory, institutional critique, and postcolonial aesthetics. Since the image contains tabulated information (seemingly about health statistics or demographic surveillance), the essay treats the data as both evidentiary and affective matter.
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Between Numbers and Narratives: Speculative Readings of Surveillance Data in Postcolonial Contexts
In the uploaded image, we encounter what appears to be a dataset—tabulated fields marked by statistical detail, medical notations, and demographic descriptors. At first glance, its structure evokes the bureaucratic rationality of recordkeeping: organized rows suggest efficiency; decimal precision intimates truth. However, approaching this data as a cultural artifact invites a speculative re-reading—one that in which tabulation performs, erases, and frames the body within colonial and postcolonial epistemes.
Data as Archive, Data as Specter
This document resembles health surveillance logs—possibly from an institutional setting in the Philippines, perhaps psychiatric or epidemiological in nature. In contexts shaped by colonial specter: it houses the traces of living subjects whose histories exceed numerical representation. Like fragments of oral testimony rendered mute by metrics, these tables recall what anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler calls “colonial aphasia”: the structured forgetting embedded in official forms of knowledge.
Each entry—anonymous yet codified—asks who gets to be seen, counted, and healed. The sterile language of “episodes,” “remissions,” or “diagnoses” belies lives lived amidst stigmatization, institutionalization, or abandonment. It is in these gaps—between what is recorded and what remains unsaid—that we find the speculative energy of this document.
Toward an Ethics of Witnessing
Speculating upon such data demands more than critique; it requires an ethics of witnessing. Drawing from in practice, Amiel Roldan, one might reimagine this image not as final evidence but as an invitation for dialogic repair. Each row were treated as an affective proposition—open to annotation, relational engagement, and communal co-authorship. -- The dataset, then, shifts from information to encounter.
The image might be layered into a painting, not as illustration but as echo—its grid subtly embedded beneath pigment, its statistical rhythm countered by expressive mark-making. Such gesture would resist spectacle while attending to what Ariella Azoulay calls “potential history”: the chance to reclaim what has been denied, overlooked, or deliberately unarchived.
Conclusion: Speculation as Method, Memory as Medium
To speculate is to imagine otherwise. When applied to institutional data—especially those formed under conditions of coloniality, stigma, or technocratic violence—speculation becomes a form of refusal. Refusal of neutrality. Refusal of erasure. In this mode, your artwork and scholarship model how archival fragments might be activated anew, turning abstraction into relation, and documentation into testimony.
-- adapting this into a more collaborative annotation project, or explore how this image might inform a future painting series rooted in Mandaluyong’s post-redevelopment histories.
As a 2003 Starr Foundation Grantee, Roldan participated in a transformative ten-month fellowship in the United States. This opportunity allowed him to observe contemporary art movements, engage with an international community of artists and curators, and develop a new body of work that bridges local and global perspectives.
Featured Work: Bridges Beyond Borders
His featured work, Bridges Beyond Borders: ACC's Global Cultural Collaboration, has been chosen as the visual identity for the newly launched ACC Global Alumni Network.
Symbol of Connection: The piece represents a private collaborative space designed to unite over 6,000 ACC alumni across various disciplines and regions.
Artistic Vision: The work embodies the ACC's core mission of advancing international dialogue and cultural exchange to foster a more harmonious world.
Legacy of Excellence: By serving as the face of this initiative, Roldan’s art highlights the enduring impact of the ACC fellowship on his career and his role in the global artistic community.
Just featured at https://www.pressenza.com/2026/01/the-asian-cultural-council-global-alumni-network-amiel-gerald-a-roldan/
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ curatorial writing practice exemplifies this path: transforming grief into infrastructure, evidence into agency, and memory into resistance. As the Philippines enters a new economic decade, such work is not peripheral—it is foundational.
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.
Please comment and tag if you like my compilations visit www.amielroldan.blogspot.com or www.amielroldan.wordpress.com
and comments at
amiel_roldan@outlook.com
amielgeraldroldan@gmail.com
A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
Recent show at ILOMOCA
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ started Independent Curatorial Manila™ as a nonprofit philantrophy while working for institutions simultaneosly early on.
The Independent Curatorial Manila™ or ICM™ is a curatorial services and guide for emerging artists in the Philippines. It is an independent/ voluntary services entity and aims to remains so. Selection is through proposal and a prerogative temporarily. Contact above for inquiries.
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