In using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to create a series of sculptural works, Marc Didou’s idea of resignation to shun away the creator’s subjectivity paradoxically renders stasis and stillness as action and a proactive exercise of agency. Going further from this idea, one can remain still for a very long time and yet the order within chaos, the butterfly from the other side of the world, inevitably leaves a footprint of this existence as it causes vibrations within the landscapes of time and space. Within spliced planes and pixelated surfaces to render a sensation of flatness, a photograph of one of his “Échos” in Turin can’t help but expand its dimensions, emanating vibrations of surfaces and bronze shades transcending beyond its two-dimensional space.This work responds to the photograph’s (and the sculptor’s) “inaction” with using recordings of Filipino indigenous instruments and narrated stories to render the flatness of historical time and geographical space. A crude, manual process of granular synthesis occurs through pixelating and splicing recordings into shreds and combining them into tapestries of rough textures and echoing vibrations. Similar to the avoidance of automating the process, the political voices of the diaspora won’t subscribe to Didou’s “resignation-as-action/creation” given their liminal, almost invisible presence among the global world order. Ongoing histories can never stand still; as political bodies, diasporic communities will never stop creating their own paths and resign against the forces of time. This serves as the starting point for encapsulating “echoes” of the pasts, presents, and futures within different intermingling spaces, as how Didou’s open-mouthed sculpture is imagined to call out.Revealing the intertwined web of time and space, the work also includes a recorded excerpt of Hannah Guanlao’s collection of monologues named “Choose Your Own Perspective” (2016). Her work captures a millennial Filipino-Canadian’s response to current historical revisionism regarding the brutal dictatorship of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s.

Source: 2018