15,000 photographs to command a nation’s fate

Snare for Birds mulls the far-reaching politics of representation and institution.

Written by Chesca Santiago
September 30, 2023

Some of my takeaways from Ateneo Art Gallery’s Snare for Birds were gleaned from small encounters during the exhibit’s programs. From an audience member who asked, more than an hour into the artists’ talk, who Dean Worcester is in the first place. Then from a chat with fellow guests who lamented the gate passes, Katipunan traffic, and other hurdles one must go through before finally stepping foot in Areté.

These remarks are necessary ramifications of Snare for Birds: Rereading the Colonial Archive, a collaborative research art project of Kiri Dalena, Lizza May David, and Jaclyn Reyes. The project departs from photographs taken by Dean Conant Worcester—an American colonial official whose images eventually shaped Filipino national memory and identity. With Dalena, David, and Reyes conversing with the images through their own distinct artistic practices, it is Snare for Birds’s intention to question the gazes and structures that maintain the colonial agenda until today. This final iteration at the Ateneo Art Gallery follows previous mountings at The Panublion Museum in Capiz and at the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library in La Union.

Charcoal on paper work by Jaclyn Reyes.

Photography for the imperial agenda

Access to the photographs was made possible through an artist residency-lab initiated by the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum (RJM) in Cologne, Germany. Appointed interior secretary of the Philippines by the American colonial government from 1901-1913, Worcester took over 15,000 photos of the Filipino peoples throughout his stay in the country. RJM houses over 3,000 of these, which Dalena, David, and Reyes regarded in Snare for Birds.

Actual image from Worcester’s collection. Image courtesy of John Tewell.

Under Worcester’s hands, the camera would serve as technology for the American imperialist agenda. Yet despite the pervasiveness of his photographs, Worcester’s role in the Philippines’ colonial fate remains largely unknown. In his images, Filipinos were maliciously portrayed as small, savage, and uncivilized peoples, incapable of self-government and thus in need of American leadership. Worcester, over six feet in height, would often pose beside the Filipinos to emphasize the natives’ stature and equate this with inferiority. This pejorative representation was used to justify American colonial interests in the Philippines, with Worcester using the photographs to stir public sentiment in the US in favor of imperialism.

Three routes to reclaim national memory

Far from being innocent, these notions of smallness and inferiority would cement American presence in the Philippines and seize Filipino national consciousness until today. Thus, in Snare for Birds, Dalena, David, and Reyes seek to reclaim the narrative through their own artistic languages.

Works for the exhibition are grouped primarily by artist. Clustered at one end are Dalena’s photographic manipulations of actual images from the collection. Most prominent are sequences of Filipinos, initially clad in traditional garb, gradually morphing into Philippine Constabulary forces. Inside a curtained area, Dalena retells the killing of resistance leader Felizardo by his very own people. Through her voice over an image of Felizardo’s murdered body from Worcester’s collection, she argues that the archive wrongly labeled Felizardo as a thief when he is, in fact, a valiant revolutionary. These two works are the most salient illustrations of Dalena making explicit the colonial underpinnings of the images and their consequences on Filipino nationhood and on notion of self.

Kiri Dalena morphs Filipinos, clad in native garb, into Philippine Constabulary forces.

Dalena’s imagery is juxtaposed against Reyes’s body of work, where chalk, graphite, and pastel portrayals of Filipinos stand as a straightforward rereading and rewriting of the archive. While Dalena puts forward the violence inscribed in the images, Reyes takes her own depictions to a more optimistic turn. It is an effort, as she explained in the artists’ talk, to pause from violence and embrace the hopeful possibility of reclaiming our own representation.

Works by Dalena and Reyes are punctuated by David’s shaped canvas works which are interspersed throughout the space. The canvases, painted in solid red, silver, and dark blue, are shaped after the negative space inside the storage facility housing Worcester’s images in RJM. As the canvases—void of any detail except color and shape—interrupt Dalena’s and Reyes’s interventions, they remind us of the simultaneous absence and presence of the archives. Despite their presence, irreconcilable gaps in access remain. By alluding to the institution itself, David calls our attention to the political and structural reconfigurations that must ensue before these gaps are to be filled.

Reyes reclaims the narrative through chalk, charcoal, and graphite.

The politics of representation and institution

In various aspects of its production, Snare for Birds self-references its core critique on the politics of representation and institution. Representation, whether through a camera or a brush or by a public official or an artist, is inherently laden with motive. But as always, it is motive that is necessarily inflected by one’s positionalities. Thus, the playing field is not equal: some can command a nation’s history, some are left to reclaim. In Snare for Birds, each decision behind production—the choice to take on graphite, to shape a canvas, or to select this image out of thousands—is in itself a reflection of the artist’s background—as a Filipino, a woman, a filmmaker, a visual artist, a Person of Color from Berlin or New York. Thus, what emerged from a single archive are three different trajectories of engagement as Dalena, David, and Reyes, carry with them their distinct positionalities behind every manipulated pixel or brushstroke.

Finally, and perhaps most essentially, Snare for Birds is also a reckoning of the very structures that have enabled its production. That its mounting was made possible only through the support of three European institutions (RJM, Goethe-Institut Manila, and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung) makes apparent the inaccessibility of our national memory. They remain largely at the mercy of institutions that are far from the Filipino’s reach: overseas, or guarded by gate passes and impenetrable traffic. For a proper decolonial rereading to ensue, the exhibition critiqued the very structures that have enabled the artists’ access to the archives. Ultimately, these are structures borne out of continuing colonial violences—which the exhibition regarded well, whether deliberately or intuitively, through the conditions of its production.

It is no wonder, then, that despite the presence of efforts such as Snare for Birds, Worcester’s hand in our colonial fate remains largely unheard of—even among the exhibition’s audience. The exhibit presumes an audience already cognizant of the context, going straight to rereading without delving deeply into what must be reread in the first place. With the exhibition running until February 2024 and more public programs anticipated, it remains to be seen how Snare for Birds’s run at the Ateneo Art Gallery will overcome the dual role of institution as enabler and impediment to reclaiming our national memory.