Empire (ABS-CBN)
Michelle Dizon
Friday, February 4th - Sunday, February 4th, 2011
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Empire (ABS-CBN) comes from my on-going cycle of works, Empire, in Fragments, which deal with the Philippines' colonial and neo-colonial history in an era of globalization. The videos that comprise the installation include shots of the movie theater at the former US military bases, shots of the walls that enclose the former seat of Spanish colonial power, shots of recently built infrastructure by the US on the southern war-torn island of Mindanao, and shots of the media conglomerate ABS-CBN's broadcast tower during a new year's celebration. All of these fragments weave together a spatial and temporal experience of the question of empire as it continues in the global south in general and in the Philippines in particular. Empire (ABS-CBN) documents the Philippine media conglomerate ABS-CBN's broadcast tower during a New Year's celebration in 2009. The work recalls Warhol's Empire in which Warhol filmed the Empire State building and slowed the film to a duration of eight hours. What is different in my work is that the "empire" is not the name of the building, but rather, a political history in the context of the Philippine nation state and its colonial and neo- colonial history. The specter that haunts this scene is marked by this text:
A beacon of light, the tower of a media conglomerate, looms over this unfinished city. I watch it from my window and wait. How is it possible to picture that which is not supposed to be seen? There is a war in the south. There is a U.S. remilitarization of the region. There are lives in the hands of the IMF and World Bank. I wait for darkness, when the spectacle of this image might make way for the silence that presses its frame. When the explosions become, not fireworks, but a political history of imperialism and a political economy of permanent crisis.
