Earthen Certainties, 2026

Senses and these;

        One tropical night on my balcony, I see the pavement sweat, smell the soil wafting through the air, and listen to a thought whispering from the distance: What do we really know from what we know?

       In the classes I instructed at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman, I often reference the sensing exercises of Prof. Flaudette May Datuin. Whenever possible, we discussed human and non-human engagement beyond dominant Euro-American epistemologies of art. Rather than thinking of art as a particular medium or a fixed discipline, we were taught and in turn, taught students to think about art broadly. When the weather allowed, I would teach outside on mats by the green grass of the gardens or by the lagoon. We would walk around the oval and observe what we saw, heard, and felt. “What do you sense?, ”I would ask the students. A flurry of answers returns to me. It was an easy question. There was no right, no wrong. And, well, I had no plans to make assessments that day anyway. Rather, it was a practice of assessing oneself. For all of us. A way of turning to what it means to be present, together as a class, and to touch the ground that surrounds us.

       Within contained, shared, temporal gallery walls, let us attempt to conduct a similar sensing. Earthen Certainties gathers grounded, embodied practices once considered marginal, associated with craft or hobby, by visual artists Ella Mendoza, Roan Alvarez, and Roselle Perez. Working with clay, circuits, and collage prints, the exhibition prompts and reconsiders the ways we hold on to what we know, what we are certain of, even as our conditions in this world constantly shift and change. In the artists’ modes of sensing, what could you see, hear, and feel through their works?

       In Ella Mendoza’s Bathala Na Ulit, clay objects are arranged in a manner akin to a shrine, a revisiting and rearrangement of the installation work from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Offerings and prayers of various practices meld and come together slowly with Mendoza’s certainty and sincerity. What do you see?

       Take a turn and walk towards Roan Alvarez’s series of freeform circuit sculptures, Soniture, emitting a quiet hum from the salvaged field recorder I inherited from my father. What could you hear?

       Then walk towards Long grasses shiver in a vanished doorway’s draft (from “Itinerary” by Adrienne Rich) by Roselle Perez. The work maps her mother’s town in Negros through collaged prints meticulously sewn, framed, and shipped to Manila. How does it make you feel?

      This space and time to be present, I hope, is what Earthen Certainties offers at this critical hour. To percolate and congeal: here, where there is a conscious engagement with the material world, and, drawing from Anna Tsing’s idea, to pay attention to the earth not as an abstraction or outside ideology, but as a complex terrain shaped by both problems and possibilities. In a state of constant change, there are hands that can make and continue to make. As Datuin suggests, art may still “shed some light on this disruptive darkness of the lived moment we find ourselves in.” (eyb)