The Aesthetics of Relational Rupture: Toward a Minor Historiography of Cultural Labor
The Aesthetics of Relational Rupture: Toward a Minor Historiography of Cultural Labor
I. Introduction: The Artist as Epistemic Disruptor
In the shifting terrain of Philippine contemporary art—where neoliberal spectacle, biennial economies, and algorithmic flattening increasingly dictate visibility—Amiel Gerald A. Roldan emerges as a figure of epistemic disruption. His practice, spanning painting, printmaking, photography, and installation, resists the centripetal pull of institutional legibility. Instead, it insists on the minor, the fragmentary, and the relational.
Born in Metro Manila in 1972 and trained at the University of the Philippines Diliman, Roldan’s trajectory is marked by both local rootedness and international circulation. From representing the Philippines at Japan Print Asia (1995) and the 4th Triennial Mondiale D’Estampes Petit Format (1998), to residencies at Chashama and ISCP in New York, his career exemplifies a transnational negotiation of cultural labor. Yet his work refuses to be subsumed into the homogenizing narratives of global contemporary art. Instead, it foregrounds memory, affective labor, and socio-political critique as counter-archives to dominant art historical paradigms.
To write about Roldan is to wager on the historiographic significance of minor gestures—small-scale oil paintings, oral testimonies, archival fragments—that destabilize the grand narratives of modernity and nationhood. His oeuvre is not a corpus but a palimpsest: layered residues of trauma, vernacular epistemologies, and post-institutional critique.
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II. Against Spectacle: The Ethics of Smallness
Roldan’s commitment to small-scale painting is not merely stylistic but ethical. In an art world dominated by monumental installations and immersive spectacles, his annotated canvases function as sites of resistance. They invite relational engagement rather than passive spectatorship, but this is not Bourriaud’s convivial relational aesthetics. Roldan’s relationality is fraught, situated, and historically burdened.
His paintings operate as mnemonic devices, bearing witness to institutional and familial ruptures. In his ongoing series on Mandaluyong communities affected by post-1990s redevelopment, oral testimonies are mobilized not as ethnographic data but as affective propositions. The painting becomes a site of listening, witnessing, and refusal.
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III. Cultural Worker, Not Creative: Labor, Refusal, and the Postcolonial Studio
Roldan’s curatorial and pedagogical engagements underscore his refusal of the “artist-genius” paradigm. His 2025 ILOMOCA exhibition Cultural Workers: Not Creative? articulates a polemical stance: the infrastructures of facilitation, pedagogy, and administration are not ancillary but constitutive of artistic practice.
This refusal to tether himself to institutions “unless treated with fairness and professionalism” is both autobiographical and systemic critique. It resonates with Édouard Glissant’s notion of tactical opacity—a refusal to be legible to extractive economies that commodify cultural labor while disavowing its conditions of possibility. Roldan’s project-based independence thus becomes a praxis of refusal, a minor politics of opacity.
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IV. Archival Hauntings: Postmemory and Critical Fabulation
Roldan’s engagement with archival fragments aligns with Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory—the transmission of traumatic knowledge across generations. His works do not illustrate history; they are haunted by it. The archival is not a source but a symptom.
Disjointed texts, vernacular symbols, and fragmented images recur in his prints and installations. These are not evidentiary but affective, implicating viewers in the silences of history. In this, Roldan’s practice resonates with Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation”—a method of reimagining the archive from the position of its absences. His art does not explain; it implicates.
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V. The Urban as Palimpsest: Memory, Erasure, and the Postcolonial City
Mandaluyong, Roldan’s birthplace and locus of practice, is a city repeatedly reconfigured by colonial, postcolonial, and neoliberal forces. His paintings and photographs depict urban ruins, informal settlements, and institutional architectures not as documentary subjects but as affective landscapes.
In his forthcoming 2026 series his studio in Mandaluyong, Roldan traces how redevelopment effaced not only physical structures but also the lives embedded within them. His work performs a counter-cartography, mapping what the city seeks to forget. The urban fabric becomes a palimpsest of memory and erasure.
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VI. Artist-Run Spaces as Methodology
Roldan’s involvement with artist-run spaces such as Surrounded by Water, Planting Rice, and Big Sky Mind exemplifies his methodological commitment to collective infrastructures. These precarious, short-lived spaces function as laboratories for alternative modes of production and community-building.
Here, Roldan is not a solitary auteur but a facilitator, mentor, and co-conspirator. His practice becomes cultural stewardship, privileging process over product, dialogue over display. This is not a romanticization of precarity but a recognition of the radical potential of self-organized infrastructures in resisting market logics.
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VII. Trauma-Informed Aesthetics: Care, Witnessing, and the Limits of Representation
Trauma informs Roldan’s methodology, not as theme but as epistemological limit. His paintings approach histories obliquely, through partial images, muted palettes, and fragmented texts. He acknowledges that some histories cannot be represented, only approached.
Care, in his practice, is not ancillary but constitutive. His engagements with communities foreground care as radical praxis, aligning with feminist and decolonial thinkers who argue that care is a political act. Roldan’s art holds space for grief, ambiguity, and unfinished narratives.
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VIII. Transnational Dialogues: ACC and Global Cultural Labor
Roldan’s connection to the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) and the Starr Foundation fellowship in 2003 exemplifies his negotiation of local and global circuits. His featured work Bridges Beyond Borders—selected as the visual identity for the ACC Global Alumni Network—embodies the mission of advancing international dialogue and cultural exchange.
This work symbolizes connection across disciplines and geographies, foregrounding Roldan’s role as both artist and cultural worker in transnational collaboration. His ACC fellowship was transformative, enabling him to observe contemporary art movements abroad while developing a practice that bridges local memory with global discourse.
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IX. Conclusion: Toward a Minor Art History
To inscribe Roldan into art history risks domesticating his radicalism. Yet to ignore his contributions perpetuates the exclusions his work critiques. What is needed is a minor art history—one that attends to the small, the relational, the resistant.
Roldan is not merely a multidisciplinary artist. He is a cartographer of memory, a steward of cultural labor, a witness to the unspoken. His practice reminds us that art is not only expression but responsibility. In a world hostile to nuance, he insists on the slow, the careful, the ethical. His oeuvre offers not just images but ways of seeing—and being—with one another.
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References
- Hirsch, M. (2012). The Generation of Postmemory. Columbia University Press.
- Hartman, S. (2008). “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, 12(2).
- Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press.
- Manning, E. (2016). The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press.
- Bourriaud, N. (1998). Relational Aesthetics. Les Presses du Réel.
- Roldan, A.G. (2025). Cultural Workers: Not Creative? Pressenza Philippines.
- Archival sources listed in the uploaded document (Cultural Center of the Philippines, Vargas Museum, Hiraya Gallery, etc.).
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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.
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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.
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