Wrapped project by Mark Salvatus

wrapped KL annexe

Wrapped:Malaysia

Mark Salvatus akan mengembara sekitar Malaysia dari 12 – 19 January 2009. Untuk menjayakan projeck wrapped:TRACES dia sangat memerlukan tempat / dinding. Jika anda berminat, sila hubungi (markrams at yahoo dot com) atau http://wrappedtraces.blogspot.com. Bantu lah dia sebab dia ada iras-iras Jerico Rosales
http://pipit.cccelsius.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=43035#43035

Wrapped:Bangkok

Wrapped: Bangkok exhibition at Nospace

exhibition of Wrapped documentations
Video and photographs
2008

Wrapped: Bangkok

Wrapped:Traces, Bangkok, Thailand
No Space Gallery
special thanks to Bank and Yoko Sakamoto
and to the people who traced their belongings on the wall
Kop Kun Krap

Wrapped

Wrapped video documentation, 2007
by Mark Salvatus

exhibited at
*IASK (National Arts Studio, Goyang, South Korea, 2007
*Grand Atrium, Shangri-la, Plaza, Mandaluyong, Philippines, 2008
*Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines 2008

Wrapped-Traces

Mark Salvatus

Collaborative/Site-Specific project

Ateneo Art Awards 2008 Exhibit

Grand Atrium of the Shangri-la Plaza, EDSA cor Shaw, Mandaluyong, Philippines

August 1-11, 2008

by Flaudette May V. Datuin

http://ctrlp-artjournal.org/

On their pots and on their statues and faces, the Yoruba carvers incise lines of varying direction, depth, and length, and leave them to scar over to serve as markers of lineage, status and personal allure. But there is more to lines that this, according to the anthropologist R.F. Thompson, via Clifford Geertz: The Yoruba associate line with civilization. “This country has become civilized,” literally means in Yoruba: “This earth has lines upon its face.” (http://hypergeertz.jku.at/GeertzTexts/Art_Cultural.htm).

I am reminded of the civilizing quality of lines when I first saw Mark Salvatus’ performance of Wrapped-Traces in South Korea, via its video documentation, which showed Salvatus – who was on a 2007 residency (International Artist Studio Korea) in Gogol-si, Goyang, about one hour away from Central Seoul, South Korea - requesting passersby to trace the outline of objects they had with them on a wall of a small structure that was scheduled for demolition, and proceeded to scar, cover, wrap and mummify these outlines with pencil. This ritual has since been re-enacted in Barcelona in Spain, Quiapo and Angono in the Philippines in 2007 and most recently, in a posh mall in Manila for the 2008 Ateneo Art Awards Exhibit.

As the cliché goes, the handwriting is on the wall for communities like Gogol; they have to be knocked down to give way to ritzy, new cities. Salvatus’ memorializing project performs and renders the cliché literal. In his statement, he says he seeks to make “a kind of history in Gogol where people around the community are part of recording and history-making using their everyday object as proof of that time.” But ironically at first glance, he seeks to preserve these objects by hiding and covering their identity and “real character.” But perhaps, like the lines on Yoruba earth, these rapt, repetitive, precise almost manically drawn lines do not conceal, let alone disfigure the face of objects and the surface on which they are drawn; instead they reveal new patterns, paths, and byways “allowing inner qualities of the substance to shine forth,” as Thompson puts it. So much so that when future archaeologists unearth these artifacts, they will not only find pleasure in the lines’ intrinsic properties, but pleasure in finding traces of loss, living and leaving in patches of soon-to-be-extinct civilizations.

Flaudette May V. Datuin is an Associate Professor of the Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines and founding chair of the House of Comfort Art Network, Inc (ART HOC). She is the author of Home Body Memory: Filipina Artists in the Visual Arts, 19th Century to the Present (University of the Philippines Press, 2002). The book is based on her dissertation for her PhD in Philippines Studies degree.

Datuin is the recipient of the Asian Scholarship Foundation and Asian Public Intellectual Fellowships, which enabled her to conduct research on contemporary women artists of China and Korea in 2002-2003, and Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Japan in 2004-2005. She is currently curating and organizing an international and interdisciplinary exhibit-conference-workshop called trauma, interrupted to be held in Manila in 2007.

Datuin currently teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the contemporary arts of Asia, art theory and aesthetics, gender issues in the arts, and special topics on hypermedia and art, among others.