On Understanding Sound Practice in Manila

Abstract

In Manila, from the 1990s until present there are artists—including practitioners of visual art and those who are from conceptual and experimental practice; musicians—including those who have been formally trained and those who are self-taught, including those who use traditional music instruments and those who use electronic, digital or other experimental music media; media artists—including those who are working on more conventional graphics to those who are engaged in new media; technicians, organizers, publishers, curators and archivists, among others, have constantly worked in projects (events, exhibitions, publications and others), talks and other forms of colloquia, and social situations. They are found in artists-run spaces that function as gallery/ bar/ studio/ performance hub; on commercial bars that feature alternative/ independent music, owned by artists or friends of artists; occasionally in university facilities like museums or auditorium; and more recently in commercial galleries and art fairs. These groups of people who have germinated from different microcosm but have existed in a common ecology is the main focus of this paper. This phenomenon is coined in this paper as sound practice. Sound practice is not new. As mentioned, it has been existing for at least 3 decades, but left unexamined as a subject of critical inquiry. Claiming a name for it opens it to scrutiny, encouraging mindful navigation of disparate testimonies of experiences, established histories, and contested genealogies that pertains to and emanates from this loose group of diverse origin came-together, co-exist(ed/ing) and form(ed/ing) a common bond. This paper then is an attempt to theorize the practice by historicizing—or to understand the practice within the historical frame of entangled and allied practices; and by examining the characteristics of the ecology that sustains and is sustained by the practice.