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Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Keywords

environmental futures, islandic relationalities, climate crisis, catastrophes, Philippine ecocriticism

Abstract

The Philippines as locus of both specific experience and shared sympathy with regard to climate change allows for an investigation of the complex factors that describe a realm of experience unique to this present age: catastrophic weather in both its scorching and diluvian iterations. In this paper, I argue that the atmospheric delusions in the artistic practices of Mark Orozco Justiniani’s Arkipelago and the Vargas Museum’s Fever Dream point to a more expansive relationality with climate that forces us to re-evaluate precisely what ecocritical scholars have called the derangements of everyday modern life. The experience of exceptional heat and rain, in this case, exemplifies the inevitable failure of modernity’s promise to improve lives, and is actually the compounded cause of the problem it is trying to address, particularly in relation to climate catastrophe. These exhibitions’ delirious plays with the conventional idea of time and space function as both critique and intervention with regard to the crises that have create them, and Philippine ecocritical theory has much to learn by way of further engaging with practices such as these. Here, there is no doubt that delirium stems from derangement, but if we take our cues from archipelagic artists, it can be considered the beginning of possibility rather than the acceptance of limitation. Finally, this paper considers the possible futurities with regard to the climate crisis which these works suggest based on the Philippine idiom. The kinabukasan imagined by both artistic practice and Philippine language tells us that the future is a state of being that is open, one that is hoped for against and despite all rational and logical possibilities of hope.

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