The Artist Enters an Unruly Archive

Words Marz Aglipay
October 31, 2024

Imagine a room of floor-to-ceiling shelves and filing cabinets, each one full of physical printed photographs stored in envelopes that have not been opened in 60 years. This is how Stephanie Syjuco described the vast archive of the Lopez Museum and Library. Visitors enter Inherent Vice to be greeted with stacks of black-and-white photographs digitally collaged on a wall, leading to the space where layers and layers of photographs that make up two related bodies of work, Inherent Vice and Force Majeure, await to be seen. This show puts a hard limit to some 1000+ images that Syjuco came across in the archives and had taken photos of, showing just a fraction of the sheer number of images in the photo morgue of the defunct Manila Chronicle newspaper stored in the Lopez Museum archives.

The contexts of these photographs could only be deciphered through labels that they were grouped in such as decorative plants, riots, explosions, actual Filipino families labeled as “relatives,” and even “hair”—labels that made sense at the time they were shot and filed. “We have been working on programs to make the materials accessible to the public,” said Isa Nazareno, historian and consultant at the Lopez Museum and Library. As of today, the Lopez Museum has no physical space because it’s still under construction. Syjuco was invited by the Lopez Museum to conduct research in their archives in June last year. It was a unique opportunity to explore a part of Philippine history that she was not privy to, having relocated to America as a child. The photos she took interest in were of the Philippines from 1968-1972, shot by Filipino photographers and intended for Filipino audiences. Her previous research in archives exposed her to Colonial Era American photographs of the Philippines.