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
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
August 2, 2026
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.
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™' s connection to the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) serves as a defining pillar of his professional journey, most recently celebrated through the launch of the ACC Global Alumni Network.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/
He is a Filipino multidisciplinary visual artist, printmaker, painter, independent curator, researcher, writer, and cultural worker whose practice spans contemporary art, curatorial work, and cultural advocacy. He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.
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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.
He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.His practice appears to represent several interconnected concerns:
Cultural work as artistic practice. Roldan has argued that the labor of curating, organizing exhibitions, teaching, documentation, and cultural administration should be understood as creative work rather than merely support work. This perspective has been reflected in his writings and exhibitions.
Social and political engagement. His artworks frequently address politics, religion, faith, denial, courage, social inequality, and the everyday experiences of Filipinos. He has stated that he draws inspiration from Filipino cultural practices while approaching painting, printmaking, and installation from a conceptual perspective.Printmaking and conceptual art. Roldan is particularly recognized for his printmaking, with works shown internationally, including exhibitions in Japan and France. His practice also encompasses painting, photography, installation, and curatorial research.International cultural exchange. A significant milestone in his career was receiving an Asian Cultural Council fellowship in 2003, which enabled him to undertake research and create work in the United States while engaging with artists and curators internationally.
More broadly, Roldan's work represents an attempt to bridge artistic production, curatorial practice, scholarship, and cultural activism . His writings often emphasize postcolonial discourse, cultural memory, and the ethics of artistic collaboration, positioning the artist not only as a maker of objects but also as a builder of cultural infrastructure.
In the Philippine contemporary art context, he can be understood as representing the figure of the artist-curator-cultural worker —someone who contributes both through making artworks and through developing exhibitions, mentoring artists, and fostering institutional and independent cultural initiatives.
Recent show at ILOMOCA
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ started Independent Curatorial Manila™ as a nonprofit philanthropy while working for institutions simultaneously 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 remain so. Selection is through proposal and a prerogative temporarily. Contact above for inquiries.
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