Departure Area

March 30, 2011

Departure area can be pigeonholed as searching for identity, route for survival, displacement from familial attachments, estrangement and relocation site, a subterfuge of dissidents, a derivation or the point of exit from a designated topography as where we took our individual journeys.

Departure area is about getting away from the old self and attempt to escape from the past that reside in a transitional space between memory and forgetting. There are questions we wanted to riposte. These haunting memories that we wanted to obliterate by giving up in with our own demon-self? Those inflicted wounds we wanted to reconcile like unrequited ardor? Why do elephants remember the same thing as what humans’ ability to dredge up even the faces of their dead loved ones? One thing for sure, it is about interpretations of our daily lives and traumas.

Departure area is also about the world at large and within this span of era that we, as spectators, unwittingly witness all about with what’s going on around us instantaneously. As of this writing, CNN video footages about the Japan devastations were as freakish as the disaster movie clips that the couch potatoes were stacked on waiting for the latest reports. Internet and technologies on the other hand, further spreading the news swiftly loud and clear crisp in every corners of the world that we have ever think of. And at a certain level, the social networking sites became an opportune systematic platform in disseminating every possible form of information which was also piling up of political agendas, pyramid marketing, message scams and systems hacking. The mass hysteria seems ubiquitous that some populaces were gullible. Some hecklers and fear-mongering folks who sent sms scare of apocalypse scenarios in line with the nuclear meltdown somehow conspicuously messes up with the situation during difficult times and inconspicuously comical.

Departure area is to epitomize time-traveler ennui or a time machine with chronicles taken in some sci-fi literatures, B-movies and metaphorical narratives for drifting. It plunges as well into the idea of leaving a dystopian place and being a migrant in strange land. This specific term of an airport section can be the exit and entry point of human trafficking and destinations to some territories where sex and drugs that have always stirred national concerns and controversies. Filipinos, in part are credulous in relation to the Middle East subsequent upheavals and the plight of the OFWs are adherent to the economic recession. Another affair is the tourism campaign ads that look as if tongue-in-cheek in a country where killing media people are omnipresent and church and politics are formidable and inseparable. Hollywood type of publicities and popular culture are an add-ons enthusiasm in some of the well-known sites like Tweeter. Prevalent issues and controversies that hint more on the doomsday topics such as the polar shift, antediluvian prophecies and perigee among others correlated with the sign-of-the-times-threads seep into its way to the bloggers’ domains. This decade also assessed the changing clime in where Al Gore advocacies about today’s weather is more of fretful than instructional. An article in National Geographic wherein some scientists insist that this Anthropocene age is human biomass. Also this year, the influential art dealer Leo Castelli and the celebrated Elizabeth Taylor passed away in their old age. In this period, it was about how we brace ourselves to challenges brought about of how we can fit to the formidable new milieu. Our daily lives, fears and traumas were forever inculcated in our collective memories as long as we breathe. – Frederick Sausa, 2011

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Participating Artists:

• Allan Balisi
• Alvin Villaruel
• Arturo Sanchez Jr.
• Dave Lock
• Dex Fernandez
• Dina Gadia
• Erik Sausa
• Eugene Jarque
• Isidro Santos
• Jacob Lindo
• Keiye Miranda-Tuazon
• Mac Valdezco
• Mariano Ching
• Mica Cabildo
• Rolf Campos
• Wire Tuazon

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