In Artists’ Talk, the art collective Plataporma will discuss multimedia projects realized as part of their research-driven contribution to Lopez Museum’s current exhibition, Extensions.
Plataporma’s Mervin Espina, Buen Calubayan, Lauren Villarama and Mark Salvatus will talk about their coming together as a process-based art and cultural research collective invited to do work related to Lopez Museum’s past, present, and future marked off by its beginnings in the 1960s at Pasay, moving into Pasig in the 1980s, and eventual shift to a larger site to house the expanding library, laboratory and museum programs.
Begun as a challenge to realize a work for the exhibition pegged on the seminal period of the 1960s, Plataporma eventually extended their proposals to encompass how the museum as an institution can rethink its ideas about community, publics, and reach via technology as current as the web and as established as radio.
Plataporma’s Now/here is a series of projects that involve evolving multimedia components and installations that evaluates the geography and institutional history of the Lopez Museum. These projects can be viewed in Gallery 5 of the museum.
The soil used in one of the projects was excavated from the old site of the Lopez Museum in Pasay, which was torn down after the museum moved to its present site in 1985. Since architectural records of the Museum were lost, Plataporma cleared an area which approximates the interior floor area of the old building. A time-lapse video, projected on the dirt through a hole in the ceiling, shows the collective clearing a plot of land.
old Lopez Museum building. As an attempt to salvage a lost work of art, the drawing will appear as a serialized coloring activity page. The mapping project seeks to assess people’s familiarity with art and museums, particularly the Lopez Museum. Several interviews were conducted within a kilometer area of the past, present and futures sites. These interviews would function as possible template for future projects and interventions.
Artist Talk is from 2-4pm. Fee is P120 per person. For inquiries, call Fanny at 631-2417. The Lopez Memorial Museum and Library is located at the ground floor of Benpres Building, Ortigas Center, Pasig City.
