The Cloud’s Ancestral Domain: Curating Refusal in the Infinite Loop of Pax Silica
The Cloud’s Ancestral Domain: Curating Refusal in the Infinite Loop of Pax Silica
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
November 16, 2026
Curatorial Frame
I write this as a cultural worker who has spent years standing at the threshold of exhibition spaces, deciding what enters the room and what remains outside the frame—gatekeeper, yes, but one who has learned that the gate itself is always already porous, always already leaking the ghosts of extraction. The Instagram Reel that reached me in mid-November 2026, posted by london.conversation and featuring Daniel Selwyn of the London Mining Network, arrives not as content but as a curatorial proposition. It is a short-form invocation that places the body of a young man against the backdrop of London’s strange theatrical interiors, a painted tribal figure lurking behind him like an uninvited ancestor, while the text scrolls the claim that AI data centres and the technologies they house “would not exist without huge extraction of resources across the global South… This is an explicitly imperialist and colonial hierarchy.”¹
The Reel’s timing is precise: Trump’s presence at the ASEAN Summit in Manila, the rumoured (and then carefully disavowed) signing of frameworks around Pax Silica, the proposed 1,620-hectare AI manufacturing hub north of Manila that local reporting links to Indigenous displacement, and the parallel resistance in places like Dupax del Norte against Metals Exploration PLC, the London-listed company whose subsidiaries have faced barricades, mothers holding children under signs that read “Isarding ti Drilling,” and the stubborn refusal of barangay councils.² The Reel does not invent the material fact; it stages it. Copper, silicon, rare earths, the freshwater thirst of data centres from Brick Lane to Leeds, the London Stock Exchange as quiet accomplice. Selwyn’s voice, and the Network’s longer body of work, insist that the digital is never dematerialised. The cloud has a geology. The algorithm has a hydrology. The “superintelligence” still needs to be cooled by water that once belonged to someone else’s river.³
I approach this as an art practitioner who has curated exhibitions on extractive aesthetics and who has learned, through failure and revision, that the most honest curatorial gesture is recursive: each show improves upon the last by admitting what the previous one could not yet see. The first time I placed a copper ore sample next to a rendered neural-net visualisation, the room felt clever. The second time, I added the recorded testimony of a community that had lost its water source, and the cleverness curdled into something closer to responsibility. The third time I refused the ore sample altogether and instead staged an empty plinth labelled with the mineral’s absence, the room finally began to breathe. This is the recursive self-improvement that cultural work demands: not the optimisation of the algorithm, but the deepening of attention until attention itself becomes a form of solidarity.
There is humour here, of the dark, dry, London kind that Selwyn’s milieu sometimes carries. We speak of “critical minerals” as though the minerals themselves were anxious, as though the neodymium were lying awake at night worrying about its role in permanent magnets. The language is already a joke that refuses to land. Pax Silica—peace of silicon—sounds like a Roman emperor who discovered semiconductors and decided to rename the Mediterranean after them. The irony is almost too neat: a peace that requires the continuous opening of new wounds in the earth. The Reel’s aesthetic is itself ironic: a man speaking of colonial hierarchy while standing in a space that still carries the visual residue of empire’s fascination with the “tribal.” The painted figure behind him is not an accident of set design; it is the return of the repressed in real time.
Yet the humour must remain humane. Behind every statistical claim about China’s midstream dominance or the UK’s data-centre expansion sits a mother in Nueva Vizcaya deciding whether the barricade will hold another night, a London resident noticing that the local river runs lower because the servers must be cooled, an Indigenous community in the Cordillera weighing the offer of a “free-carried interest” against the permanent alteration of ancestral domain.⁴ The karmic law here is not mystical; it is material. What is taken without free, prior, and informed consent returns as resistance, as polluted water, as the slow accumulation of distrust that no amount of “consultation” language can dissolve. Informed consent is not a checkbox on a corporate social responsibility form. It is the living pulse of a community’s right to say no, and to keep saying no even when the project is already framed as destiny.
The flavour of the hosting dialect—part London activist cadence, part Manila street-level sharpness, part the understated dryness of people who have watched too many memoranda of understanding arrive with fanfare and leave with open pits—demands that we refuse both the technocratic smoothness of “supply-chain security” and the pure victimology that erases southern agency. Philippine elites are not simply acted upon; they negotiate, they extract rents, they sometimes sell the future of their own communities with a smile and a backhander. The comments under the Reel itself register this with painful clarity: politicians “corrupt to the core,” the distinction between government and people drawn like a line in the sand that the tide of capital keeps erasing.⁵
As a gatekeeper I am interested in the genre of the intervention. The Reel is neither pure documentary nor pure propaganda; it is a hybrid form that uses the vernacular of social media to smuggle a world-systems argument into the attention economy. It participates in a longer exhibition history of counter-mapping and counter-narration: the London Mining Network’s own reports, the Environmental Justice Atlas, the long tradition of solidarity media that treats the voice of the affected community as the primary text rather than the illustration.⁶ My own practice has tried to learn from this. When I curate, I no longer begin with the object; I begin with the relation the object has already broken or sustained. The copper wire in the server farm is not neutral material; it is a condensed history of dispossession and possibility. To exhibit it without that history is to curate amnesia.
The infinite loop premise is already present in the material itself. Extraction feeds computation; computation generates new demand for extraction; the “green” and “intelligent” future requires more of the same violent opening of the earth that the previous fossil regime required. The circular economy that policy papers celebrate is, in practice, often a circle of displacement: the waste of one process becomes the feedstock of another while the communities at the periphery remain the permanent externalities. Yet there is another circle available—the recursive circle of attention, refusal, and revision. Each time a community holds a barricade, each time a cultural worker refuses the clean narrative of progress, the loop is interrupted long enough for a different future to become imaginable. The work of the cultural worker is to keep that interruption open, to refuse the premature closure that capital and state both prefer.
I have revised this frame three times already. The first version was too pure in its solidarity, too willing to flatten Philippine agency into pure resistance. The second version over-corrected into a cold structuralism that left no room for the mother’s face under the barricade sign. This third version tries to hold both the structural violence and the living subjects who negotiate, resist, and sometimes compromise within it. That is the recursive self-improvement the work requires: not the perfection of the position, but the continuous correction of the gaze so that the gaze itself becomes less extractive.
The Reel is not the final word. It is an opening. As a gatekeeper I choose to keep the gate ajar, to let the painted ancestor, the London activist, the Nueva Vizcaya mother, and the data-centre water bill all enter the same room and refuse to resolve into a single story. The exhibition continues. The loop turns. The question is whether we will keep turning with it, or whether we will finally learn to step outside the circle and begin a different geometry of relation.
Disconfirmation of the Alternative on Its Merits and Premise
The strongest alternative reading of Pax Silica and the broader critical-minerals push is the developmentalist-security narrative: that friend-shoring supply chains away from Chinese dominance is both a legitimate security interest and a developmental opportunity for countries like the Philippines, which can capture investment, jobs, and technology transfer while contributing to a more “resilient” global AI infrastructure. On its face the claim is coherent. China’s concentration of rare-earth processing capacity is real. The strategic vulnerability is real. The desire of middle-income countries to move up the value chain is real.
Yet the premise fails on several merits. First, the historical record of similar arrangements shows that technology transfer and genuine local value addition are the exception, not the rule. The pattern of raw or semi-processed export, with high-value manufacturing and intellectual property retained in the core, has proven remarkably durable. Second, the democratic deficit is not incidental; it is structural. When frameworks are advanced with limited public consultation and when Indigenous free, prior, and informed consent is treated as a procedural hurdle rather than a substantive right, the developmental claim loses legitimacy. Third, the ecological and social costs—water stress, displacement, pollution of rivers—are not temporary externalities to be managed later; they are immediate and often irreversible for the communities that bear them. The alternative therefore rests on an optimistic teleology that the evidence does not support. It promises a circular economy of mutual benefit while delivering, in practice, another turn of the extractive loop.
Curatorial Narrative Critiquing
To curate is to decide what becomes visible and what remains in the shadow of the plinth. The Reel makes visible the mineral substrate of the digital; my task is to keep that visibility from hardening into a new orthodoxy. The critique must therefore cut in several directions at once.
The imperialist-colonial framing, while rhetorically powerful, risks analytical inflation. Formal colonialism involved direct administrative control and settler structures. Contemporary arrangements more often operate through asymmetric interdependence, elite bargains, and the quiet force of market access. Calling every unequal exchange “colonial” can obscure the agency of southern states and elites who actively shape the terms of engagement, sometimes to the detriment of their own populations. A more precise vocabulary—unequal ecological exchange, neo-extractivism, digital extractivism—allows us to name the violence without dissolving the specificity of historical form.⁷
At the same time, the developmentalist counter-narrative must be held to account for its own mystifications. The language of “economic security zones” and “quality investment” tends to treat land as empty and consent as a technicality. The proposed hub in New Clark City and the exploration permits in Nueva Vizcaya do not arrive on blank territory; they arrive on ancestral domains, agricultural land, and watersheds already under pressure. When US envoys emphasise “full consultation” only after protests have already formed, the sequence itself is revealing.⁸
My own curatorial methodology has been shaped by exhibition histories that treat the archive as a site of contestation rather than authority. In earlier projects I placed mining company annual reports beside community video testimonies and invited viewers to notice the difference in temporal register: the report’s smooth forward projection versus the testimony’s insistence on what has already been lost. The method is simple and still radical: refuse the single narrator. The Reel performs a version of this by placing Selwyn’s analysis in the same visual field as the painted figure and the scrolling text of local resistance. The critique, then, is not that the Reel is wrong, but that its necessary polemical sharpness can sometimes flatten the very communities it seeks to defend into pure sites of victimhood or pure sites of heroism. Real communities are messier. They contain collaborators and resisters, people who need the wage and people who refuse the mine, elders who remember previous cycles of extraction and youth who have never known the river clean.
The karmic and ethical demand is therefore double: to refuse the erasure of structural violence and to refuse the erasure of complexity. Informed consent remains the non-negotiable pulse. Where it is absent or coerced, the arrangement fails the most basic test of legitimacy, regardless of the strategic elegance of the supply-chain argument. The cultural worker’s role is to keep that test visible, to stage the materials of the debate so that the audience cannot look away from the cost, and to revise the staging whenever the previous version has become too comfortable.
Expanded Summative
What the Reel, the protests, the clarifying statements from ambassadors, and the longer archive of critical-minerals scholarship together reveal is a single, recursive predicament: the material basis of advanced computation cannot be wished away, yet the current political economy of securing that material basis systematically externalises its costs onto the least powerful. Copper still has to come from somewhere. Rare earths still require separation. Data centres still require water and energy at scales that local ecosystems and communities often cannot absorb without damage. The question is never whether extraction will occur; the question is under what relations of power, consent, and distribution it will occur, and whether those relations can be made less violent than the ones we have inherited.
The loop is both diagnostic and generative. Diagnostically, it names the way each technological “solution” generates new demand for the very materials whose extraction produced the previous crisis. Generatively, it points toward the possibility of a different circle: one in which attention, refusal, and institutional redesign feed one another. Cultural work sits inside that second circle. By staging the mineral history of the digital, by refusing the clean separation of technology from territory, by treating community testimony as primary rather than illustrative, the cultural worker interrupts the smooth circulation of the first loop long enough for alternative arrangements to become thinkable.
The recursive self-improvement required of us is practical. Each exhibition, each text, each public conversation must be better than the last at holding complexity without losing the ethical edge. We must get better at distinguishing formal empire from structural dependency, better at recognising southern elite agency without using that recognition to excuse northern capital, better at centring free, prior, and informed consent as a living practice rather than a procedural form. We must get better at laughing at the absurdity of “Pax Silica” without laughing at the people whose lives are being reorganised by it.
The local flavour of the moment—Manila’s street protests, London’s activist networks, the quiet determination of barangay councils—reminds us that the abstract categories of “Global South” and “core” are inhabited by specific people with specific histories and specific capacities for refusal. The work of relation is to keep those specificities visible while still naming the larger patterns that connect a data centre in Leeds to a river in Nueva Vizcaya.
In the end the curatorial task is modest and endless: to keep the gate ajar, to keep the loop from closing too quickly, to keep revising the frame so that the next version sees more clearly than the last. The cloud will continue to demand its minerals. The question is whether we will continue to demand a different accounting of the cost.
Conclusion and Relation
The materials return us to the beginning. The painted figure behind Selwyn, the barricade in Dupax del Norte, the water bill in a London borough, the carefully worded ambassadorial clarification that no signing was ever planned—all of these are moments in the same infinite loop. Extraction and computation, consent and its absence, the digital and the geological, keep turning into one another. The cultural worker’s contribution is not to stop the loop by force of will, but to make its turning visible, painful, and therefore open to redirection. Relation is the practice of refusing to let any single node—the algorithm, the ore body, the protest sign, the policy paper—claim the whole story. We relate by staging the connections and then revising the staging. The circle can be a trap or a practice of return. We choose, recursively, which one it will be.
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Footnotes
1. Daniel Selwyn, quoted in london.conversation Instagram Reel, 14 November 2026.
2. “Trade war in focus at ASEAN summit ahead of Trump arrival,” Philstar, 15 November 2026; “No Pax Silica deal at ASEAN Summit, says US envoy,” Rappler, 7 November 2026; “At the barricade: A mother’s stand against mining in Dupax del Norte,” Bulatlat, 2 May 2026.
3. London Mining Network, various reports and educational materials on critical minerals and just transition, 2024–2026; Amnesty International, “What are ‘critical minerals’ and why do they matter for human rights?,” June 2026.
4. Metals Exploration Plc project documentation and community responses, 2025–2026; Wikipedia summary of Dupax del Norte anti-mining protests (drawing on local reporting).
5. Comments section under the london.conversation Reel, November 2026.
6. London Mining Network, “What we do,” and related campaign materials; Environmental Justice Atlas documentation of mining conflicts.
7. See, inter alia, discussions of unequal ecological exchange and digital extractivism in Science, Amnesty International, and academic literature on AI infrastructures and critical minerals, 2025–2026.
8. US Ambassador Lee Lipton statements reported across Philstar, Rappler, Manila Times, and Inquirer, November 2026.
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**Bibliography (Chicago style)**
Amnesty International. “What Are ‘Critical Minerals’ and Why Do They Matter for Human Rights?” June 2026. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2026/06/what-are-critical-minerals-and-why-do-they-matter-for-human-rights/.
“At the Barricade: A Mother’s Stand against Mining in Dupax del Norte.” Bulatlat, 2 May 2026. https://www.bulatlat.com/2026/05/02/at-the-barricade-a-mothers-stand-against-mining-in-dupax-del-norte/.
London Mining Network. Various reports, trustees’ reports, and educational resources, 2024–2026. https://londonminingnetwork.org/.
“No Pax Silica Deal at ASEAN Summit, Says US Envoy.” Rappler, 7 November 2026. https://www.rappler.com/philippines/no-pax-silica-deal-us-ambassador-lee-lipton-statement-asean-summit-2026/.
“Trade War in Focus at ASEAN Summit Ahead of Trump Arrival.” Philstar, 15 November 2026. https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2026/11/15/2570304/trade-war-focus-asean-summit-ahead-trump-arrival.
Additional reporting from Manila Times, Inquirer, Newsweek, and Metals Exploration Plc project disclosures, 2025–2026.
About the author.
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan© (born 1972, Mandaluyong City, Philippines) is a multidisciplinary Filipino visual artist, printmaker, painter, independent curator, researcher, writer, and cultural worker whose practice has unfolded since the mid-to-late 1990s. He is not primarily defined by discrete artworks but by sustained engagement with the full ecology of Philippine contemporary art: production, exhibition-making, documentation, pedagogy, criticism, artist development, and the often-invisible labor that sustains cultural infrastructure.
Educated in Studio Painting (BA Fine Arts and Certificate of Fine Arts) at the University of the Philippines Diliman (roughly 1993–1998), Roldan’s practice quickly expanded beyond painting into printmaking, photography, installation, writing, and curatorial work. Early recognition included an Honourable Mention from the Art Association of the Philippines (1995) and international print exhibitions: the 1996 Japan-Asia Print Exhibition at the Fukuoka Prefectural Museum and the 4th Triennial Mondiale d’Estampes Petit Format in Chamalières, France (1998). His prints from this period addressed socially charged subjects, including HIV/AIDS work beginning around 1995, and titles such as Mga OCWs Galing Pinas, Karaoke Queen, Mga Tinikling Dancers ng Pinas, Wealth, Liberate, Permanence, and Abundance. These works treat printmaking as a vehicle for social commentary, cultural documentation, and reflection on Filipino identity, marginality, labor, and everyday experience.A pivotal chapter came with the 2003–2004 Asian Cultural Council (ACC) Starr Foundation Fellowship. Roldan spent approximately ten months in the United States, working in association with the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York—where he was among the early Filipino participants—and the Experimental Printmaking Institute in Pennsylvania. He also held a Chashama studio residency in Tribeca. The fellowship enabled observation of contemporary practices, dialogue with international artists and curators, and production of new work that linked local concerns with global contexts. More recently, his piece Bridges Beyond Borders (representing cultural collaboration and exchange) was selected as visual identity for the ACC Global Alumni Network, underscoring a two-way circulation of ideas rather than one-directional “representation” of the Philippines abroad.Key contributions to Philippine art can be understood across interconnected dimensions:1. Printmaking as socially engaged practice — Roldan has consistently used the medium for questions of identity, migration, popular culture, inequality, and Filipino lived experience, situating the print within a tradition that functions simultaneously as aesthetic object, document, and argument.2. Artist-curator continuum — He has organized and curated exhibitions, documented practices, and supported artist development with institutions and spaces including Hiraya Gallery, Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Kulay Diwa Art Galleries (where he served in curatorial/directorial roles), Cultural Center of the Philippines, NCCA-related projects, Imahica Art, Gallerie Anna, and others. He has collaborated with figures such as Roberto Chabet, Brenda Fajardo, and international artists (e.g., from Studio One in Canberra, as well as practitioners from Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Korea). More recently he has worked as program/marketing director and consultant curator for art fairs and spaces (including involvement with Manila Bang Show 2024 and MOCAF 2024). For Roldan these activities are not peripheral administration but forms of creative and intellectual labor.3. Independent curatorial culture — He founded or leads Independent Curatorial Manila (ICM), conceived as an independent/voluntary curatorial service and guide for emerging Filipino artists. This reflects a commitment to pathways outside strictly institutional structures in an ecosystem heavily reliant on informal networks, galleries, independent spaces, and personal relationships.4. International exchange and cultural memory — Beyond the ACC fellowship, his practice emphasizes postcolonial discourse, cultural memory, social inequality, politics, religion, faith, denial, courage, and everyday Filipino life. Writing, research, archiving, and annotation form integral parts of the work; recent reflective essays (including “Cultural Workers: Not Creative?” associated with a 2025 group exhibition at ILOMOCA) explicitly challenge hierarchies that privilege object-making over documentation, facilitation, pedagogy, marketing, and infrastructure-building.5. Art as research and infrastructure — Roldan’s trajectory is circular rather than linear: artist → researcher → curator → writer → organizer → archivist → facilitator → artist. Making exhibitions possible, mentoring, documenting overlooked histories, building counter-archives, and writing critically about the conditions of art production are treated as artistic acts in their own right. This challenges romantic notions of the solitary artist and reframes the cultural worker as central to the art ecology.Works are held in collections including the Singapore National Gallery / Singapore Museum, Luciano Benetton Collection (Imago Mundi / Venice), Rockefeller-related holdings, Lisa H. Mackie Collection, Philippine Department of Health collection, and the Experimental Printmaking Institute. Solo exhibitions include Memoirs of Pipay (Hiraya Gallery, 1996/2000), Pasintabi (Kulay Diwa, early 2000s), and Creating Identities (UP CFA Corridor Gallery, 2014), among others; group shows span Philippine institutions and international print platforms.In one concise framing: Amiel Gerald Roldan is an artist-curator-cultural worker whose practice connects art-making with memory, social inquiry, international dialogue, independent curation, and the construction of cultural infrastructure. His potential legacy resides equally in the artworks produced, the ideas articulated in writing and reflection, and the often-invisible relational and organizational labor that helps other artists and artworks circulate. In a Philippine contemporary art field shaped by limited institutional resources and dense interpersonal networks, that third dimension—the work of making the ecology function—may prove among the most consequential.
Recent group show at ILOMOCA
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Chashama at 40 Worth Open Studios
https://chashama.org/event/40-worth-open-studios-phase-1/
Asian Cultural Council Alumni Global Networkhttps://alumni.asianculturalcouncil.org/?fbclid=IwdGRjcAPlR6NjbGNrA-VG_2V4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHoy6hXUptbaQi5LdFAHcNWqhwblxYv_wRDZyf06-O7Yjv73hEGOOlphX0cPZ_aem_sK6989WBcpBEFLsQqr0kdg
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Disclaimer:
This work is my original writing unless otherwise cited; any errors or omissions are my responsibility.The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any organization or institution.
Furthermore, the commentary reflects my personal interpretation of publicly available data and is offered as fair comment on matters of public interest. It does not allege criminal liability or wrongdoing by any individual.
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