20.1.10

Whats going on in America?


I woke up today to find the end of the Democratic filibuster. Scott Brown, a Republican has taken post of Kennedy's old spot in Massachusetts. A spot that has been occupied by the Democrats for over 40 years. And then this. Cindy McCain posting for the NoH8 Campaign.
What the what?

19.1.10

Google: How it read my mind.


Sorta.

I am sitting at my trusty coffee place again at 1 in the morning and I see this great thing in front of me. Stopped at the red light was a yellow VW Westfalia with an ebony coloured canoe on its roof. For some reason it made me laugh and I knew I had to take a picture, but I forgot my camera again and I debated using the camera on my laptop. but I convinced myself it wouldn't work. It sped away 2 seconds before the actual green light.
I immediately went to Google image that scene. I typed "canoe" and "westfalia" and lo and behold.

Matining Codex



I have begun work on what I deem to be a pretty ambitious piece. Last November I began to seriously research creation mythologies of the Malay-Philippine region. I was looking specifically for stories that were somehow uninfluenced by Spanish colonization in the early 16th century. Here is the proposed proposal.
-------------
The Philippines is comprised of 7,107 islands with 170 different languages, it is a country created from the arbitration of the Spanish Dominion with regard to the bounty of the natural resources of the land and not the distinct cultural and ethnic peoples that inhabit the islands. Their society was organized by barangays (villages) and their property and population was determined by how much they could fit into their barangays (barangay also mean boats). Because of the archipelago configuration it isolated groups of barangays and as a result creation myths became abundant in types and variations throughout the country. The Catholic friars saw the importance of these folklore to exist alongside Catholicism. These heathen stories still exist today and influence the complexity of contemporary Filipino culture.

The Boxer Codex is a manuscript from 1595 of 75 illustrations of people in the Malay-Philippine region. Its namesake comes from Charles R. Boxer, a professor at Indiana University and owner of this manuscript. The codex involve 15 illustrations of the peoples of the Philippines before the first onset of the Spanish Catholic colonization in the beginning of the 16th century. This codex contains a lot of our modern understanding of the Filipino peoples before Spanish colonization in 1521.

The Matining Codex is a collection of found objects and assemblages that speak about the existing relationship of Filipinos to faith; heathen and Catholicism. It is comprised of 12 objects sitting on a low plinth/altar with a Christian cross rising in the middle. Each of the 12 objects is an idol-like representation of a common heathen God or character from the varied creation myths of the islands. Their physical image are based on the literal contemporary translations of their names or descriptions from archived oral histories.