Mark Salvatus

Mark Salvatus (b. 1980). I studied Advertising at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila and started as an artist as a street artist. Since 2006, I call my overall artistic project as “Salvage Projects” working across various disciplines and media. Basing it on the word ‘salvage’ or to save or rescue which is also the meaning of my surname, I try to build direct and indirect engagements using objects, photography, archives, videos, installations, participatory projects, and platform organizing that present different outcomes of energies and experiences. My preoccupations are based on constant movements and travels – coming from the countryside to the city and elsewhere, addressing and building new imaginations of the contemporary land –urban and rural, the glocal migrant and the vernacular historiographies. I am interested in communication and miscommunication as a form and as a structure and not as a process. A form that is unstable, vulnerable and precarious as a fluid form and not fixed or established. A practice that deals a lot with collecting, repetition and series based on my lived experiences and its relationship to the world.

Curator

Tessa Maria Guazon

Tessa Maria Guazon is a curator and educator based in Manila. She developed the proposal for the Southeast Asia Neighborhood Network during the ICI workshop in Manila. This is a research project with women artists Alma Quinto and Nathalie Dagmang with pedagogy as a central goal. She is part of the interlocutor program for the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial organized by the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. She is the coordinator for Exhibitions and Curatorial Analysis for the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. Her current project for the network considers curation and curating as collectivist practices. In 2019, she launched Curating in Local Contexts workshops with colleagues Louise Salas and Mayumi Hirano. The workshops aim to understand how curation is practiced in the Philippines, within specific conditions of possibilities and constraints.

Artists