On hollow claims to victory
A short think piece on Jefrë’s “The Victor”.
Written by Chesca Santiago
September 5, 2023
The past week has seen another addition to Metro Manila’s grayscape. Filipino-American artist Jefrë recently announced the completion of his The Victor installation at Robinsons Land’s Bridgetown. Towering steely and contentious, it’s impossible to miss if you’re lurking along the border between Pasig and Quezon City (and on social media).
The Victor looms at almost 200 feet and takes pride in standing taller than the Statue of Liberty, sans the pedestal. Global recognition is at the core of its narrative, which is as straightforward as it can get: a faceless man with a raised right fist to symbolize—you guess it—victory. Elsewhere, Jefrë explained that the perforated stainless steel installation pays homage to the success of hardworking Filipinos across the globe. Based in Chicago, Illinois, the artist himself is no stranger to the international.
Formal qualities notwithstanding (I leave this to everyone’s personal takes), the installation is all nice and inspiring if you let the narrative take its hold. Only that we shouldn’t. Taken against its context, The Victor emerges as a champion of neoliberal development and nationalist myth-making—a disservice to the very people whom it claims to uphold.
The victor of neoliberalism
The installation is built as a landmark of Robinsons Land Corporation’s Bridgetown, a township on which residential condominiums, commercial establishments, schools, transportation facilities, and other constituents of a “self-sustaining community” will rise. For decades, development projects such as Bridgetown have been dominant models in the country’s infrastructure landscape. It joins an extensive portfolio of privately-funded infrastructure projects, which have been rightly criticized as instruments of neoliberal development.
The intentions of the installation thus warrant second thought when it stands on land borne out of a system that, in actuality, exploits more than serves the Filipino. Historically, projects like Bridgetown only serve the moneyed few and are essentially profit-making tools for its private developers. Thus, against the backdrop of Bridgetown’s skyscrapers, the installation, whose sleek metallic body seems straight out of a futuristic film, appears nothing less than the triumphant symbol of progress. However, it is progress that does not serve the majority of the hardworking Filipinos it insists to champion.
A ploy for nationalist myth-making
This is not to assert that the Filipino has no victories to celebrate, nor to deprive us of the capacity to find pride and inspiration where fit. But this should not entail the diminution of our critical handles. In the case of The Victor, the narrative it propounds must be approached with caution when it is produced in the context of a nation embroiled in political and economic turmoil. Where is victory amid record-high inflation rates and ballooning debts? When it is proffered as a national narrative, it risks whitewashing structural failures as well. A case even more dangerous in the Philippine context, where national myths have the power to command a nation’s fate.
Thus, by extension, the installation appears blind (after all, it is faceless) to the long history of populist and propagandist machinery on which it stands. If it wasn’t, I’d like to believe it wouldn’t have made itself a likely ploy for nationalist myth-making agenda. In the end, aspirational intentions may be welcomed, perhaps even necessary. But in the case of The Victor, victory is a 200-feet fantasy as hollow as the installation’s perforated skin.
