mariano batocabe

Perplex Time

Graphite on Cloth

To Bring on the Mesmeric Condition

Graphite on Cloth

LONG DISTANCE ARTIFICIAL EYE

In his second solo show titled “Long Distance Artificial Eye,” Mariano Batacobe continues his exploration of labor and distance as conditions, themes, and prompts for artistic production. Revolving primarily around his father and his absence in particular—a result of him being a contractual sea-based migrant worker for almost three decades—the exhibition is Batocabe’s modest articulation of what the artist Allan Sekula called “the forgotten space” of the contemporary global economy as filtered through the deeply personal.

           For Batocabe, the international maritime industry and its dependence on Filipino workers palpably represents the intertwining of labor and distance. In their physical entanglement within the global circulation of goods, workers just like the artist’s father are not only separated from their families but made invisible. Under precarious work conditions, they are both exposed to countless hazards and further estranged from their loved ones as communication becomes near impossible and vacations are made rare, even cruelly shortened.

Employing drawing as a conceptual gesture, Batocabe re-presents photographs of and taken by his father while emphasizing the medium’s dimension of physical labor. The blur and grain of the source images—an off-center depiction of the Panama Canal and his father's repeatedly photocopied passport—are attentively replicated by the artist for all their potential significations. Additionally, ornate wooden furniture are transferred from the Batocabe household to the exhibition space, positioned alongside the artist’s drawings and video installation.

Bizarro Coconut: Heaps of Sand and Customs

Graphite on Paper

Dangerous Discontent (4 work series), 2019

Are We Not Men? Too Much Paradise, Video, 3:30 mins, 2019

Rhizome Drawings

Mark making on paper, series of 25 drawings

The Whitest Gold

Salt is the threshold of the body. The Whitest Gold is a personal articulation of the delineation between labor and work when it comes to Mariano Batocabe’s practice as an artist: the physical act of labor, including its physical and economic toll, is done in order to do work. However, work is not necessarily labor.

These notions stem from being situated in Las Piñas, a city founded on salt beds, and a historically crucial trade route from Laguna de Bay to Manila. The wide, mirrored fields of Manila’s southern coast are now a sight of the past, now replaced with a new form of currency in the form of concrete conduits that unceremoniously shuffle people to the belly of the beast and back.

The history of the center runs parallel to the histories of the fringes, where locales find themselves geographically close to the nexus of commerce, culture, and governance, but rendered nearly inaccessible by standstill thoroughfares and urban neglect.

Unlike other forms of legal tender, however, salt is vital to the human body. It’s an underlying element of each contraction of muscle, however minute. It is also a mark of labor: the remnant of sweat. Likewise, mark-making leaves the evidence of movement; it’s proof of intention to create an object. It begins as a mark, and the cumulative mass of particles can change a landscape.

Batocabe’s works approach marking as a fundamental act, and a process in itself. The procedure of drawing is rendered meditative, fluid, and intuitive. Sometimes the movement predates articulation in words, but it is nonetheless a movement. It records presence, which is both the agent and aftermath of being.

Multilateral Bisections