a Painter working in large format murals depicts the foreign intervention on the political evolution and labor movements in the Philippines. Overtures of Orwell's 1984 double speak in language and its export from corporate towers to the globe, are smartly reflected.

Statement :

We read from the archives that Filipinos creatively dealt with duress under colonial rule. For instance, in order to elude forced labor, which sustained the tradition of building churches the archipelago, the natives, as they were called, would keep up appearances, or leave without a trace. They would also move around:

One of the most common practices resorted to by the townspeople was to disappear from the towns in order to avoid carrying out these obligations that they considered too heavy for them to bear. We note from a decree issued in 1621 by the Audiencia that the townspeople of Majayjay were continually refusing to be counted as citizens of the town. To this end if they had a house in the town itself and a field in another town, they erected a house in their field and when asked by the authorities of Majayjay whether they had fulfilled their duties they replied that they had done so in the neighboring town. If the officials of the neighboring town asked them the same question they replied that they were domiciled at Majayjay and would fulfil their duties there. This practice became so widespread that the Audiencia was compelled to order the provincial governor to tear down the houses erected by the natives in their field so as to compel them to live in the town.

It may be argued that these tactics were, as an ethnographer would phrase, 'weapons of the weak', a culture of crafting and inventing means with which to claim a moral world of inalienable entitlements within an oppressive colonial situation.
Orozco Justiniani draws on the energies of postcolonial agency to live out a subjection within a space of settling and migrancy. From a locus previously colonized by Europe and currently ravaged by global capital largely emanating from the United States, the labor of an artist like Justiniani, which is conscripted by the market of the mobile art world, evades and slips, but only to resurface as a doubling, a dissembling, a carnivalesque hall of mirrors in which texts and images ricochet to conjure the horrors of civilization and the "banality of evil." Justiniani lays bare the deep structure of ideology not only in words but also in the power that enforces them, the magic of its guise. For example, the sign "War Live", which references mass media's pedding of violence on a mass scale, morphes into "Raw Evil", which is an indexical articulation of its instantiaiton. In the same vein, a confessional turns into a cabinet of curiosity and disclosure when "Saw Flesh" transforms into "Wash Self" under sacerdotal auspice and 'overlooking'.
Justiniani calls these visual palindromes. And like a quick-change artist of makeshift imagination, a trickster of conscience, and a bricoleur-artisan of myriad schemes, he recovers the skill and technology of the art of the jeepney, the reconfigured Willys of the American soldiers of the Pacific war, to bounce back a simulacrum of distortion and deceit lurking beneath the uncanny phraseology of an everyday life that is bedeviled by spectacle and the specter of acts waiting in the wings.

works