Global aestheticscapes: Re-imag(in)ing the global experiences of selected filipino artists through their installation artworks

Abstract

This paper attempts to look at the contemporary global condition of Filipino art production by using the term “aestheticscapes”1 as a critical category of analysis. The confluence of the terms “aesthetics” and “-scapes” allows us to stretch the language of aesthetic production in a global scale of interactions, exchanges, contacts, circulations, negotiations, and amalgamations of geo and ethnoaesthetic positions. Significantly, “aestheticscapes” magnify the conditions of epistemic relations between global powers and discourses of the agencies of the artists via history, geography, aesthetic epistemes, and other social narratives. By looking at the installation artworks of selected Filipino diasporic, migrant, and mobile artists; this paper proposes that the conditions of global openness and mobility of ideas and people produce possibilities of reimagining and reworlding art history and art theory using the narrative of diasporic, migrant and mobile lives of artists and their works. This paper also suggests that aestheticscapes construct a platform of epistemic inquiry that fleshes out the different perspectival situatedness and conditions of aesthetic positions in global artworld and world art (studies).