We Are Drowning in Art and Cultural Relics in the Philippines
We Are Drowning in Art and Cultural Relics in the Philippines
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
February 21, 2026
Is it possible to drown in things? If so, the Philippines is currently practicing a very particular kind of aquatic hoarding: a slow, bureaucratic, humid, and oddly sentimental inundation of art and cultural relics. We have objects that once sang—masks, canvases, carved santos, posters, vinyl records, festival costumes—now gasping in the dim corners of warehouses, condo storages, municipal basements, and the occasional attic that smells faintly of old glue and mangoes. Who decided that the afterlife of an artwork is to be boxed, stacked, and forgotten? Who decided that cultural memory should be stored like seasonal clothes, to be pulled out only when nostalgia demands it? And why, in a country that prides itself on living memory, do so many of our material memories live in limbo?
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The Flood of Objects
Imagine a map of the archipelago where instead of islands we mark repositories: the National Museum, provincial museums with one earnest curator and a leaky roof, private collectors with climate control and a taste for the dramatic, municipal halls with framed photographs of mayors past, and the ubiquitous storage units that smell of dust and deferred decisions. Now imagine each repository as a drop in a rising tide. The tide is not water but objects—artworks, relics, ephemera—arriving by donation, by purchase, by inheritance, by the gentle coercion of cultural policy, and by the more forceful coercion of market speculation. What happens when the tide outpaces the shore? Do we build seawalls of catalogues and inventories, or do we let the current carry things away?
Is it not a little comic that in a nation where so much is performed—fiestas, wakes, weddings, political theater—so much of our material culture is relegated to private, invisible performance spaces? The performance continues, but the props are hidden. The costumes are in storage. The painted backdrops are rolled up and labeled “maybe.” The relics are preserved, yes, but preserved for whom? For posterity? For the market? For the next mayor’s ribbon-cutting? Or for the speculative collector who imagines a future in which owning a piece of Philippine art is a hedge against cultural amnesia?
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Warehouses and Condo Storages
There is a certain modern Filipino irony in the fact that the same condominium that promises “urban convenience” also offers storage units where family heirlooms go to retire. Have you ever visited a condo storage room and felt like you were in a museum of deferred decisions? Cardboard boxes labeled with dates and names, a framed painting leaning against a bicycle, a wooden santo wrapped in a bedsheet like a secret. The storage unit is the contemporary reliquary: climate-controlled, gated, and utterly private. It is where art goes when it is too expensive to display and too precious to discard.
And then there are the warehouses—industrial cathedrals where crates are stacked like altars. In these spaces, art is treated as inventory, not as conversation. It is catalogued, barcoded, and sometimes forgotten. Who walks through these aisles and asks, “Why is this here?” Who reads the labels and imagines the hands that made the object, the rituals it participated in, the laughter and the prayers it witnessed? Or do we simply tally its value and move on to the next crate?
Is it not strange that we can be so meticulous about storage and so casual about access? We can ensure that a painting does not fade, that a textile does not mildew, that a sculpture does not crack—but we cannot ensure that people see these things, that they are woven into the living fabric of communities. Preservation without circulation is like keeping a language in a dictionary that no one reads.
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The Life of Art Objects
What is the life of an artwork? Does it begin when the artist signs the canvas, or when the public first sees it? Does it end when it is boxed and shelved, or does it continue in the quiet, private conversations between owner and object? In the Philippines, many artworks have multiple lives: they are made, displayed, sold, gifted, stored, rediscovered, and sometimes repurposed. Each life leaves a trace: a scratch, a note, a provenance that reads like a family tree. But what happens when the chain of custody becomes a chain of custody forms? When the story of an object is reduced to a line item on an inventory sheet?
We must ask: why does this object exist? Is it a devotional image meant to be prayed to, a painting meant to provoke, a poster meant to persuade, or a souvenir meant to be sold? The answer matters because it determines how we should treat it. A santo that has been kissed and soothed by generations deserves a different afterlife than a mass-produced print meant for tourists. Yet both can end up in the same storage unit, side by side, their contexts flattened.
And how is it made? The materials, the labor, the social relations embedded in an object are part of its ethics. A textile woven by a community of artisans carries with it a web of livelihoods and knowledge. A sculpture carved by a master craftsman is a repository of technique. When such objects are hidden away, the knowledge that produced them risks being hidden too. Are we preserving objects or are we preserving the conditions of their making?
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Who Decides What Survives
If art is a conversation, who gets to speak? Who decides which objects are worthy of preservation and which are disposable? In the Philippines, decisions about cultural heritage are made by a motley crew: museum curators, collectors, politicians, cultural workers, and sometimes the market. Each has its own logic. Curators think in terms of narratives and representation. Collectors think in terms of taste and investment. Politicians think in terms of legacy and optics. The market thinks in terms of liquidity. Rarely do these logics align.
Is it not a little scandalous that the fate of a community’s memory can hinge on the whims of a collector or the budget of a museum? What happens when a provincial festival’s costumes are sold to a private collector in the city? What happens when a church’s santos are loaned to a museum and never returned? Who advocates for the communities whose histories are embodied in these objects?
There is also the question of access. Preservation is not merely about preventing decay; it is about enabling encounter. A painting locked away in a warehouse is preserved but not public. A relic stored in a condo is safe but not shared. Preservation without access is a kind of hoarding. It is as if we are saving our culture for a future that may never come, while the present goes unserved.
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Anecdote
I once visited a provincial museum where the curator, a woman with a laugh like a bell, showed me a crate labeled “Fiesta Regalia.” Inside were dozens of headdresses, sequined and feathered, their colors dulled by time. She told me that these were used in a festival that had been canceled for years because the town could not afford the permits. The costumes were kept in the museum because the town council feared they would be stolen if left in the barangay hall. So the costumes lived in the museum, safe but unused, waiting for a festival that might never return. “We are preserving the possibility of celebration,” she said, and I thought: what a melancholy way to celebrate.
Is this not the paradox of preservation? We save the tools of celebration while the celebration itself fades. We keep the props but lose the play.
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Satirical Prescription
If we are drowning in art and relics, perhaps we need lifeguards who are less interested in catalogues and more interested in choreography. What would happen if we treated storage as a stage and warehouses as theaters? What if every crate came with a performance plan? Imagine a program where stored objects are loaned to schools, to community centers, to jeepney drivers, to sari-sari stores, for a month at a time. Imagine a santo that spends a year in a barangay, being prayed to and cared for, then returns to the museum with new stories. Imagine a painting that is displayed in a mall for a week, then in a hospital, then in a public market. Would we not be richer for the circulation?
We could also be more thoughtful about what we produce. Artists, institutions, and collectors might ask before making or acquiring: why does this exist, how is it made, and what happens to it in its life? Is it meant to be ephemeral? Then let it be ephemeral, and plan for its end. Is it meant to be durable? Then ensure it is made with materials and labor that can be sustained. Is it meant to be communal? Then ensure it remains accessible.
And for the love of all that is holy and baroque, can we stop treating storage as a moral victory? Storing an object is not the same as caring for a culture. Care requires relationships, not just climate control.
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Conclusion
We are not merely drowning in objects; we are drowning in the consequences of our choices about objects. The flood is not natural; it is the result of accumulation without circulation, preservation without access, and production without purpose. The remedy is not to build bigger warehouses or to legislate more inventories. The remedy is to reimagine the life of things.
What if we treated art as a verb rather than a noun? What if preservation meant participation? What if the next time we open a crate, we do so with a plan to let the object speak, to let it be used, to let it be loved? The Philippines is a living archive; its memory is not only in museums but in markets, in churches, in kitchens, in the hands that mend and the voices that remember. If we are to survive this delightful, ridiculous deluge, we must learn to swim together with our objects, to carry them into the light, and to ask, always and insistently: why does this exist, how is it made, and what happens to it in its life?
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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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