Spectral Infrastructures and the Aesthetics of Submersion — Philippine Art, Political Ontology, and the Return of the Flood
Spectral Infrastructures and the Aesthetics of Submersion — Philippine Art, Political Ontology, and the Return of the Flood
Marcos probably thought he could use Remulla, as President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III did in the case of Conchita Carpio-Morales, as a potent weapon against his enemies.
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The quoted graphic is drawn from Rigoberto Tiglao’s Manila Times column (appearing around 8–9 September 2026). It posits that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. initially viewed Ombudsman Jesus Crispin “Boying” Remulla as an instrument of political leverage—analogous to how President Benigno Aquino III deployed Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales against selected opponents. The subsequent paragraph you supplied completes the thought: the intended instrumentalization was overtaken by events. The “ghost” flood-control scandal, which had been smoldering since Marcos’s own public disclosures in August 2025, erupted into full public view with testimony from DPWH officials, contractors, and former security personnel who described suitcase deliveries of cash. These accounts repeatedly named former House Speaker Martin Romualdez (Marcos’s first cousin) as a central beneficiary. The catastrophic flooding of August 2026 then transformed bureaucratic scandal into visceral public fury. Any presidential intervention to shield Romualdez would have been perceived as a direct betrayal of the very anti-corruption rhetoric Marcos had earlier embraced, risking political inundation.
By early September 2026 the institutional machinery had moved: the Ombudsman filed a non-bailable plunder case alleging approximately ₱7.4 billion ($118 million) in kickbacks linked to flood-control and related infrastructure allocations between 2022 and 2025; the Sandiganbayan issued an arrest warrant; and Romualdez was taken into custody while hospitalized. Remulla publicly framed the filing as evidence that “there are no sacred cows.”
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The sequence illustrates a classic tension between instrumental rationality and the contingent force of historical contingency. Marcos’s presumed calculation—that an ombudsman could be retained as a selective prosecutorial sword—rested on a familiar Philippine political grammar of patronage and controlled accountability. Yet the flood-control affair introduced an exogenous variable of unusual potency: the material reality of water. Ghost projects and substandard works are abstract until monsoon rains convert them into drowned barangays, lost livelihoods, and visible corpses. Public outrage then acquires an almost elemental character; it ceases to be merely partisan and becomes meteorological and moral at once.
Testimonies of suitcase cash deliveries function as a modern equivalent of the classical “smoking gun.” They convert diffuse allegations of systemic graft into narrative scenes that ordinary citizens can visualize. Once those scenes circulate, the political cost of familial protection escalates beyond ordinary dynastic calculation. The administration finds itself trapped between two forms of drowning: the literal flooding that exposes the failure of infrastructure, and the metaphorical tsunami of popular indignation that would follow any transparent act of dynastic salvage.
Remulla’s trajectory adds a further layer. Appointed in a context of political alliance, he now operates under the formal constitutional independence of the Ombudsman’s office. Whether that independence is genuine conversion, strategic repositioning, or simply the product of evidentiary momentum is less important than the public perception it generates. The appearance of institutional autonomy becomes itself a political fact that constrains the palace.
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A summative conclusion
At the deepest level the episode stages a confrontation between two ontologies of power. One is the dynastic-patrimonial ontology in which the state is an extension of the household, and the cousin’s skin is continuous with the president’s own. The other is the emergent, if fragile, public ontology in which the state’s legitimacy is measured by its capacity to protect the collective body from both natural and man-made inundation. Floodwater, in this reading, is not merely a natural disaster; it is the return of the repressed—the material consequence of abstracted public funds that were supposed to have been transformed into concrete and sheet piles.
Philosophically one may recall the ancient insight that *hubris* invites *nemesis*, yet here the nemesis arrives not as a singular thunderbolt but as an accumulation of delayed consequences: ghost projects, delayed prosecutions, and finally the monsoon itself. The “heavens conspired” is therefore less a theological claim than a phenomenological one. The confluence of testimony, institutional procedure, and meteorological catastrophe produced a moment in which the ordinary mechanisms of elite insulation temporarily failed.
The episode also discloses the limits of instrumental reason in a mediated public sphere. An ombudsman may be appointed as a weapon, yet once the weapon is placed in the public domain and charged with a case of such visceral resonance, it acquires a momentum that exceeds the original intention of its wielder. The sovereign who attempts to reclaim control risks being swept away by the very current he sought to direct.
In the end the scandal is not merely about the theft of flood-control funds. It is about the theft of the future capacity of a people to inhabit their own land without periodic submersion. When that theft becomes visible in the simultaneous forms of empty river walls and rising water, the political calculation that once seemed shrewd is revealed as a form of collective self-endangerment. The tsunami of outrage is therefore not an irrational excess; it is the rational response of a body politic that has recognized, however fleetingly, that its own survival is at stake.
The core textual fragment under consideration is the following premise:
“However, the heavens conspired against that. The ghost flood control scandal started to unravel in September, and set off a firestorm of public outrage. Public Works and Highways officials, contractors, and even ex-soldiers who delivered the dirty money in suitcases testified and accused Romualdez, among many other Congress representatives. The horrific floods last month intensified the fury against those complicit in stealing funds from flood control projects — and against the administration for apparently letting them off the hook. If Marcos intervened to save his cousin’s skin, he would have drowned in the tsunami of people’s outrage.”
This passage is continuous with the preceding observation (from Rigoberto Tiglao’s column) that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. may have intended to deploy Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla as a selective political instrument, in the manner that Benigno Aquino III once used Conchita Carpio-Morales. The intended instrumentalization was overtaken by the material and testimonial force of the flood-control scandal, culminating in the September 2026 filing of non-bailable plunder charges against former House Speaker Martin Romualdez and his subsequent arrest.
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Spectral Infrastructures and the Aesthetics of Submersion — Philippine Art, Political Ontology, and the Return of the Flood
The political drama of ghost flood-control projects in the Philippines is not merely a matter of fiscal malfeasance or dynastic self-preservation. It is an ontological crisis in which the very ground of collective existence is revealed as porous, stolen, and spectral. When concrete that was never poured meets the monsoon that inevitably arrives, the resulting inundation is both literal and metaphysical. Philippine art, long attuned to the politics of the submerged, the erased, and the returning, offers a privileged site for reading this crisis.
At the most immediate level, the scandal reactivates a central motif in Philippine visual and performative culture: water as both destroyer and revealer. From the colonial-era depictions of floods in early twentieth-century genre painting to the post-Haiyan installations of contemporary artists, water has functioned as a medium that strips away the veneer of developmentalist progress. The “ghost project” is the perfect inverse of the monumental public work; it is infrastructure that exists only as accounting entry, as photographic fiction, as suitcase of cash. In the language of aesthetics, it is a pure simulacrum—an image without referent—until the flood restores the referent with catastrophic force. The public outrage that followed the August 2026 deluges was therefore not simply moral indignation; it was an aesthetic recognition that the land had been sold while still under water.
This recognition finds deep resonance in the Filipino philosophical concepts of *loób* and *kapwa*. *Loób*—the inner relational will—implies that the self is constituted through its capacity for genuine interiority and reciprocity. When public funds meant to protect the body of the people are diverted into private accumulation, the *loób* of the polity is violated. The suitcase deliveries of cash become a grotesque parody of *bayanihan*: instead of collective labor moving a house, we witness the nocturnal movement of money that leaves communities unhoused when the waters rise. *Kapwa*, the recognition of the shared self, is inverted into its opposite: a radical non-recognition in which the suffering of the flooded barangay is treated as external to the elite body. Art that insists on *kapwa*—whether in the collaborative practices of social practice artists or in the counter-archival work of those who document disaster—functions as a restorative ethics against this inversion.
Esoterically, the scandal may be read through the older Austronesian and folk-Catholic cosmologies still latent in Philippine culture. Flood narratives appear across indigenous epics and in the Christian appropriation of the deluge. In these stories, the flood is never purely natural; it is a judgment that exposes the hidden moral order. The “ghost” infrastructure is a modern equivalent of the cursed object or the improperly buried dead—that which was never properly materialized and therefore returns to haunt. Contemporary Philippine artists who work with spectral materials (unfinished structures, residual mud, archival absences, participatory rituals of naming the dead) are already practicing a form of necropolitical aesthetics. They make visible the fact that the state’s claim to protect life is itself a ghost when the funds for that protection have been spirited away.
Philosophically, the episode stages a clash between two temporalities. Dynastic power operates according to the long cycle of familial reproduction and the short cycle of electoral calculation. The monsoon operates according to a geological and climatic temporality that is indifferent to political calendars. When these temporalities collide, the result is a moment of what Walter Benjamin might have called a “dialectical image”—a flash in which the past (the stolen funds, the unbuilt walls) and the present (the rising water, the public fury) illuminate one another. Philippine art has repeatedly sought to seize such flashes: the social realist canvases of the Martial Law years, the installation works that re-stage disaster as ongoing rather than exceptional, the performance practices that place the artist’s body in the same vulnerable relation to water as the displaced resident.
The critical force of the scandal, then, is not exhausted by the arrest of any single political figure. It lies in the exposure of a structural condition: the conversion of climate adaptation funds into private wealth constitutes a form of slow violence that becomes suddenly visible only when the rains arrive. Art that takes this condition seriously cannot content itself with representation. It must itself become a form of counter-infrastructure—an alternative system of memory, solidarity, and material attention that refuses the logic of the ghost project. In this sense, the most radical Philippine art of the present is already a practice of flood control by other means: the patient work of keeping the submerged from disappearing entirely from public consciousness.
In the end, the “tsunami of people’s outrage” is not merely a political event. It is an aesthetic and ontological event in which the body politic recognizes, however briefly, that its own survival depends on the integrity of the ground beneath its feet. When that ground has been sold, the flood does not merely destroy; it reveals. Philippine art, at its most rigorous, has always understood this revelation. The current crisis simply raises the stakes: either art continues to serve as the counter-memory of the submerged, or it risks becoming another form of ghost infrastructure—beautiful, funded, and ultimately useless when the waters rise.
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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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