Worth a Caveat, and a Term of Venery for the Composition: a Pride of Proclamations.

Worth a Caveat, and a Term of Venery for the Composition: a Pride of Proclamations.

Let us begin, as one must in this climate of perpetual national self-diagnosis, with the necessary disclaimer. What follows is not a dismissal of infrastructure, nor a denial that geography still exerts its quiet tyranny, nor even a defense of maritime nostalgia. It is merely the observation—made with the weary affection one reserves for a relative who has once again arrived at the family reunion with a freshly printed manifesto—that the text under consideration is a perfect specimen of a certain contemporary Philippine cultural production: the grand, steel-and-destiny essay that mistakes volume for vision and urgency for insight. In the local art scene we have long specialized in comparing one shit work to another shit work; the exercise is not cruelty but hygiene. It keeps the air clear. So let us place this TARNA sermon beside its cousins on the gallery wall and see what the juxtaposition reveals.

The piece arrives already shouting in small caps and italics, as if the reader might otherwise miss the eschatological stakes: if your country is not part or linked with TARNA, you are not going to be part of the 21st century and beyond. The Philippines is just a spectator rather than a participant in this new economic order—one that is not based on maritime but on land connectivity. One hears the echo of a hundred artist statements that begin with the same breathless certainty. Geography was destiny; now destiny has been rebranded as track gauge and fiber optic. The author has discovered the Trans-Asian Railway Network Agreement the way certain painters once discovered the color black—suddenly, everything is explained by it. History is marshaled like a supporting cast of extras: imperial dreamers, Cold War freeze, BRI muscle, the Laos-China Railway as proof of concept. The prose swells, the metaphors harden into steel, and the Philippines is assigned its role as cautionary tale, museum piece, strategic orphan, house built on sand.

It is, in its way, impressive. The architecture of the argument is tidy. Speed versus delay, cost versus insurance premiums, digital backbone versus submarine vulnerability, passenger visas versus carbon-heavy air travel. One almost feels the trains arriving on time. And yet the whole edifice sits in the same uneasy relation to lived complexity that a large, heavily theorized installation occupies toward the actual bodies that must walk around it. The essay performs the classic Philippine cultural maneuver: it diagnoses exclusion with such rhetorical force that exclusion becomes the only identity on offer. We are not linked; therefore we are becoming irrelevant; therefore the window is closing; therefore history is repeating. The loop is closed, airtight, and oddly consoling. There is a certain comfort in being told, with scholarly apparatus and apocalyptic flourish, that one’s marginality is both structural and irreversible. It spares one the messier work of asking how a nation of islands might invent its own intermodal cunning, or whether “participation” in a continental grid might itself become another form of dependency dressed in progressive language.

Compare this, if you will, to the other shit art currently circulating in the scene—the large-scale mixed-media pieces that announce postcolonial trauma via rusted corrugated iron and LED timelines, or the video essays that map every typhoon to every failed policy with the same breathless causality. Both genres share a family resemblance. They mistake density for depth. They prefer the clean binary (connected/bypassed, maritime/continental, spectator/player) to the awkward middle registers where most actual policy and most actual art actually live. They are humane in intention—who does not want resilience, cheaper logistics, less vulnerability?—and yet they treat the nation as a character in a morality play rather than a stubborn, improvising, frequently contradictory organism. The TARNA text is particularly pure in this regard. It grants the Philippines sovereign choice and then immediately frames that choice as civilizational suicide. The tone is that of the concerned older cousin who has just returned from a residency in a landlocked capital and now finds the archipelago’s relationship to water faintly embarrassing.

Philosophically, the essay rests on a quiet metaphysics of connection. To be linked is to be real; to remain maritime is to fade into the museum. Yet connection has never been a simple good. The same continental ambition that lays track also concentrates power, standardizes gauges, and decides which nodes matter. The non-linked nation is declared a museum piece, but the linked nation risks becoming a corridor—useful, efficient, and quietly extractable. The essay’s own history section almost admits this: imperial sketches, Soviet buffers, Chinese capital filling the gaps. The skeleton of TARNA and the muscle of BRI are presented as symbiotic, which is accurate enough; the question of whose body is being animated is left politely unasked. In the Philippine art world we have grown accustomed to works that celebrate hybridity while remaining allergic to the actual friction of hybrid conditions. This text does the geopolitical equivalent. It longs for the continental grid while treating the sea as a fading paradigm rather than a continuing, stubborn medium of relation.

And still—here is the humane part—the impulse is recognizable. We are a people chronically anxious about being left behind, and the anxiety is not baseless. Port congestion is real. Logistics costs bite. Talent does leave. The essay’s best moments are those in which it simply names the compounding disadvantage of delay. The problem is not the diagnosis; it is the theatricality with which the diagnosis is delivered, the way it converts a complex infrastructural and diplomatic question into a single, glittering binary. In the galleries we see the same move weekly: one shit installation announces the death of the local; another shit painting announces its resurrection via indigenous pigment and Instagram. Both are, in their way, sincere. Both leave the actual work of living inside the contradiction largely untouched.

A pride of proclamations, then. The term of venery feels apt. These texts travel in packs. They arrive with maps, timelines, and the same underlying conviction that history has finally revealed its true direction and that we are, once again, standing on the wrong side of the tracks. One can admire the engineering of the argument while still noticing that the train it describes has no room for the messy, salt-stained improvisations by which archipelagic nations have always survived. The Philippines is not doomed by its absence from TARNA any more than it was saved by the galleon trade or condemned by steam. It remains what it has always been: a place that must invent its relevance with the materials at hand—water, weather, people who refuse to stay put, and the occasional capacity to look at a grand continental vision and say, with affectionate disrespect, that the composition is impressive, the urgency is real, and the certainty is still, somehow, a little bit shit.