The Angry Christ: Plot and Plantation 2021 Artist's zine

(Photo courtesy of SAKA) For us, the plot and bungkalan have provided a rich frame through which to think about The Angry Christ. In our work on and around this art object, we have been trying to uncover a hidden use value, to see if the mural’s queer “anger” might be radically reprogrammed towards other ends. We feel that such a (mis)reading of the mural poses important questions about the potentials of artistic practice more generally, especially as it relates to a wider project of collective liberation. For us as working artists, it has helped to unsettle certain internalized frameworks for making (and making sense of) art within the context of a heavily guarded global art system that is modeled, like so much else, on the blueprint of the plantation. We have come to understand that we have indeed never left. Given this, we seek to learn from those modes of living and persisting that have emerged from the most difficult pockets of space, and to cultivate this learning, over time and with work, into organized modes of confrontation. which generally occurs on large-scale properties that were supposed to have been broken up and redistributed under the country’s land reform program. In stark contrast to the false promises of this government program, bungkalan offers a glimpse of how genuine land reform and food sovereignty could be practiced in reality, simultaneously throwing into relief the perversity of the existing system, in which the majority of those who physically till the soil remain in a state of landlessness and hunger. Being both protest and cultivation, bungkalan is a gesture that harbors both outrage and care. This militant activity in fact has very humble origins. For as long as plantations have existed in the Philippines, Filipino peasants and agrarian workers have been cultivating small pockets of idle land within plantation properties out of bare necessity to grow food to eat. Bungkalan has its roots in this long-standing practice. What began as a means of surviving the plantation system ripened, through the guidance and support of various leftist political groups, into an organized effort to directly confront this system. In this way, we understand bungkalan as part of an alternative history of the plantation, one that suggests links to other stories, other contexts, and one that punctures through the overwhelming sense of extinction that pervades the plantation to gesture towards an alternative future. In tracing out this shared history, we have been especially indebted to the Jamaican theorist, Sylvia Wynter, whose writing seeks again and again to unsettle those supposedly human truths that have been produced and enforced through the dominant lens of Western thought. In her essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Wynter outlines what she calls a “secretive history” of the colonial plantation system in the Caribbean, one that is centered on the small plots of land that were given by planters to their African slave transplants so that they could grow their own food. Despite this being a direct product of the plantation system, a cost-efficient way to reproduce labor-power, Wynter emphasizes how the collective cultivation of various subsistence crops inside the plot also nurtured an oppositional mode of life, a culture that was antithetical to the dominant market-oriented system in which it was embedded. “This culture recreated traditional values—use values,” Wynter writes. “This folk culture became a source of cultural guerilla resistance to the plantation system.”