The Contested Image: CCTV, Authorship, and the Politics of Framing in Philippine Visual Culture
The Contested Image: CCTV, Authorship, and the Politics of Framing in Philippine Visual Culture
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
September 4, 2026
The affidavit of denial executed by Davao journalist Ben Jason Tesiorna on 26 February 2026 stages a precise and layered dispute over a single technical image. Recorded by Tesiorna himself during a December 2013 (or 2015, per variant accounts) media demonstration of Davao City’s newly installed Central 911 CCTV system, the footage was later extracted, subtitled in English, and projected by ICC Prosecutor Julian Nicholls during the confirmation-of-charges hearing against former President Rodrigo R. Duterte. Tesiorna asserts copyright ownership, absence of authorization, temporal misrepresentation (playback of a prior incident presented as if contemporaneous with presidential inaction), and the addition of subtitles that ascribe voice and moral valence foreign to the original recording. What appears as a legal claim concerning intellectual property and evidentiary integrity opens onto a deeper problematic: the ontology of the technical image, the violence of the frame, and the residual sovereignty of the local recorder against universalizing institutions.
This dispute finds its most resonant philosophical and critical elaboration within the history and contemporary practices of Philippine art. Philippine visual culture has long been a site where the politics of looking, the ethics of mediation, and the contest over who may authorize the appearance of violence are fought with particular intensity. From colonial ethnography through Martial Law social realism to the digital documentation of the Duterte-era drug war, Filipino artists and photographers have repeatedly confronted the same questions Tesiorna raises: What is the proper temporal and intentional horizon of an image? Who owns the right to frame it? And what secondary violence occurs when a technical demonstration, a documentary trace, or a private act of recording is recontextualized as moral or juridical indictment?
The Technical Image and Its Postcolonial Afterlives
The CCTV sequence at the heart of the affidavit is paradigmatic of what Vilém Flusser termed the technical image: not a representation of the world but a programmed surface that encodes and redistributes information according to the apparatus that produces it. In Davao in 2013–2015, the apparatus was municipal: a showcase of optical capacity, comparable, Tesiorna insists, to systems already operating in Makati. The killing visible within the frame belonged to an earlier register—an Agdao market incident already investigated—and was exhibited precisely to demonstrate playback fidelity. No simultaneous crime occurred; no journalist present, including the recorder, rushed to alert authorities because none was warranted. The image’s intentionality was pedagogical and technological, not forensic in the prosecutorial sense.
Philippine art has repeatedly returned to this gap between the apparatus’s claim to neutrality and the political uses to which its outputs are put. Early experimental video practices, beginning with Johnny Manahan’s pioneering works of the 1970s, already treated the closed-circuit and the television monitor as sites of fractured attention and institutional power rather than transparent windows. Jean Marie Syjuco’s *See Me, See You (Revenge of the Giraffe)* (1986) incorporated live CCTV feedback, rendering the viewer simultaneously observer and observed, and thereby exposing the reciprocal violence of the surveillance gaze. These works prefigure the contemporary condition in which municipal or state optical systems—Davao’s Central 911 being a prominent local instance—generate archives that can be detached from their originating context and redeployed under entirely different regimes of meaning.
The postcolonial dimension intensifies the stakes. Colonial photography in the Philippines functioned as an ethnographic and administrative technology that fixed the native body within grids of visibility and control. The technical image under Duterte’s local and later national governance reactivated a similar logic: the CCTV as both instrument of security and potential archive of sovereign power. When such an image migrates to The Hague and is subtitled into a narrative of crimes against humanity, the movement recapitulates a familiar trajectory—the local technical trace elevated into global moral evidence—while simultaneously erasing the conditions of its production. Tesiorna’s insistence on copyright and original intentionality is therefore not merely proprietary; it is a claim to residual authorship against the universalizing frame.
Framing Violence: From Social Realism to the Night Shift
Philippine art of the Martial Law period developed sophisticated strategies for contending with the state’s monopoly on the visible. Social realist painters and photographers, operating under censorship, employed allegory, fragmentation, and the careful orchestration of absence to make state violence appear without direct confrontation. The camera, when it could be used, became both witness and potential collaborator. The same dialectic reappears, intensified, in the visual culture of the Duterte drug war.
The exhibition *Dark Lens / Lente ng Karimlan: The Filipino Camera in Duterte’s Republic* (2018) gathered the work of photographers—Eloisa Lopez, Br. Ciriaco Santiago III, Ezra Acayan, Raffy Lerma—who documented extrajudicial killings under conditions of extreme risk. These images do not merely record death; they interrogate the ethics of framing it. The corpse on the pavement, the cardboard sign, the mourning family, the night-time police operation: each composition negotiates the tension between the demand to make violence visible and the danger that visibility itself becomes spectacular, desensitizing, or available for political appropriation. Scholars reviewing the project noted that the digital camera returned photography to its “old intimacies with death and state violence,” while social media expanded the images’ circulation far beyond traditional print circuits.
Carlo Gabuco’s installations push the confrontation further. In *Ang Mga Walang Pangalan* (“Those Without Names”), viewers sit on a chair that, upon rising, reveals a bullet hole; the actual bullet that killed a specific victim is displayed nearby; walls are covered with photographs of funerals and mourning. The work forces a corporeal encounter with the aftermath of EJK, refusing the safe distance of the screen or the courtroom exhibit. Nikki Luna’s *Female Fighter* (2018), an aluminum panel punctured by M4 bullet holes into the shape of a womb, responds to Duterte’s explicit gendered threats and translates state language into material violence. Collectives such as RESBAK organized poetic and visual interventions that insisted on naming the nameless and refusing the reduction of victims to statistics.
These practices share with Tesiorna’s affidavit a fundamental concern: the integrity of the image’s relation to its originating event and the ethical cost of its subsequent framing. Where Gabuco and the *Dark Lens* photographers work to restore the human particularity that official narratives erase, Tesiorna works to restore the technical and temporal particularity that the ICC presentation allegedly erased. Both gestures resist the conversion of local traces into abstract evidence of systemic criminality without residual accountability to the conditions of their making.
Authorship, Appropriation, and the Tribunal of History
Tesiorna’s claim of copyright and his demand for apology and removal of the video from ICC records constitute an assertion of authorial sovereignty. In an age of digital reproducibility and institutional extraction, such claims are increasingly rare and therefore philosophically significant. Philippine experimental film and video have long explored the politics of found footage, appropriation, and the unstable boundary between document and construction. Yason Banal’s *Chop-Chopped First Lady + Chop-Chopped First Daughter* (2005), which juxtaposes archival political violence with the aesthetics of the “massacre movie,” exemplifies the critical potential of recontextualization—yet also its ethical risks. The difference lies in intentionality and power: when an artist reworks public or historical material to expose ideological operations, the gesture can be counter-hegemonic; when a prosecutorial apparatus extracts a journalist’s private recording, adds subtitles that redirect its meaning, and broadcasts it worldwide without consultation, the gesture risks becoming a secondary appropriation that places the original recorder in danger while claiming moral authority.
The affidavit thus functions as a form of artistic-critical counter-statement. It insists that the technical image retains a trace of its originating intentionality—the demonstration of optical capacity rather than the documentation of presidential indifference—and that this intentionality imposes ethical limits on subsequent framing. In doing so, it aligns with a broader Philippine artistic tradition of contesting official memory through alternative archives, erased slogans (Kiri Dalena), re-enactments of massacre (Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien’s work on Escalante), and collaborative memorialization with survivors of Martial Law violence.
Conclusion: The Fragile Sovereignty of the Frame
The Tesiorna affidavit and the rich corpus of Philippine art that confronts state violence and the politics of the image converge on a single, esoteric insight: every act of framing is an act of power, and every technical image carries within it the possibility of both revelation and betrayal. The CCTV demonstration in Davao was never merely data; it was a local performance of technological modernity under a particular regime of security. When that performance is re-timed, subtitled, and elevated into evidence of crimes against humanity, the operation discloses the fragility of truth under conditions of mediation. Philippine artists have long understood this fragility and have developed practices—documentary, installation, video, collaborative memorial—that seek to reclaim the image’s temporal fidelity, its human particularity, and its residual authorship against both local sovereign power and international institutions that claim universal jurisdiction over the visible.
In the end, the dispute is not only about whether a particular killing was real-time or playback, nor solely about copyright. It is about whether the technical image, once released into the currents of history and justice, can still be answerable to the conditions of its making—and whether those who first captured the light retain any claim against those who later decide what that light shall mean. Philippine art, in its most rigorous and critical manifestations, has answered that the claim persists, however fragile, and that the struggle over the frame remains a central site of political and philosophical contestation.
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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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