Costantino Zicarelli Finds Artifice in the Archive

Navigating and then discarding the limitations of the documentary and the imaginary, Zicarelli’s show forgoes any singular narrative, revealing the failures and shortcomings of knowledge production.

Written by Sean Carballo
Images courtesy of Artinformal Gallery
September 22, 2023

In view: Costantino Zicarelli’s works mounted at Artinformal Makati.

Early into the seventies, an American professor embarked on a journey to survey the country’s local languages. Charles Walton, the linguist who initiated this formidable research, compiled and presented his findings over the course of his eight-year study. The resulting paper, published in the February 1979 issue of Anthropological Linguistics, was titled “A Philippine Language Tree.” A painstaking, highly technical report, the study depicted “a tree representing a classification of languages based on a particular approach to the evaluation of shared cognate percentages for 122 of the Philippine languages.”

Walton’s scholarship, a wide-ranging and systematic attempt by an outsider to construct a kind of universalist structure about a former colony, feels attuned to practices of imperial ethnography, especially when situated within the militant and geopolitical relations between the United States and the Philippines at the time. The effects of these colonial knowledge practices continue to reverberate to this day, whether psychological, social, or structural.

In view: An installation shot from Costantino Zicarelli’s exhibition at Artinformal Gallery.

In Costantino Zicarelli’s ongoing exhibit at Artinformal Makati, variations of Walton’s “language tree” appear smudged out and scribbled over by black marker. Defaced and malformed, the original text is rendered a palimpsest, a vandalized document that overturns the organization of Walton’s language structures. It surfaces as Zicarelli’s attempt to undercut the colonizer’s desire for knowledge.

Zicarelli, through his muddled frames, zooms into the cracks and fissures left behind by the colonial archive. His process involves selecting a range of sources, manipulating them into pixelated forms, and finally drawing each resulting image by hand. The result is a restless, uncanny, and impish accumulation of texts and textures, faces and floras.

In view: Costantino Zicarelli’s work mounted at Artinformal Makati.

Recontextualizing a broad selection of archival material gives Zicarelli an opportunity to explore the links between fact and fiction. Here, allusions to Philippine colonial history serve as fodder for a more encompassing architecture. The titular creature of the Predator movies lurks alongside the figures of tribesmen, farmers, and folk dancers. Scholarly texts sit beside the objects of their study: Zicarelli reproduces pages from Henry Savage Landor’s The Gems of the East and interposes them with images of the tribes Landor describes.

Navigating and then discarding the limitations of the documentary and the imaginary, Zicarelli’s show forgoes any singular narrative. Instead, the artist conjures an archive that self-consciously doubles back on itself, revealing the failures and shortcomings of knowledge production. Even the show’s title, Malay tuwa noong a mang iha, I-Dyos awra y Sir! repenta ‘la matino?, features both a declaration and a question in the same breath.

But what masters does knowledge serve in the end? And what does the unerring pursuit of it imply? In interviews, the Mojave American poet Natalie Diaz tackles these questions with sharp-edged skepticism. “The things that I know are only considered knowledge if someone outside finds value in it,” Diaz has said. The very nature of the word suggests a procedure of extraction and consumption inextricable from the power structures of empire and nation. Inside Zicarelli’s archive, that quest for knowledge becomes a fool’s errand. Although we sense its weight, its illegibility remains powerfully insoluble.