Martyr Museum in Manila

Speaker: Marian Pastor Roces
In association with Biennale Society and School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU

March 14, 2007 | 6.30 pm
Audio Visual Room, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Marian Pastor Roces, an independent curator and cultural critic, has a long-term interest in the various dynamics, often deceptively progressive, that usurp emancipatory projects. She is engaged in theorizing curatorship and museologizing imperatives in light of the Empire as human condition. Marian Pastor Roces is also President of TAO Management Inc., which has developed a specialization in museum projects with social equity agenda.

The paper is a personal post-mortem on a museum the author re-curated in 1998 for the centennial of the declaration of the Philippine independence. This site is officially called a secular shrine as it was the prison- chamber of Dr. Jose Rizal, physician and polyglot, who was executed in 1898 for writing inflammatory novels against the Spanish regime. This execution led to the Philippine revolution and the declaration of the first republic in Asia. The paper explores the complex tensions between and among religious imperatives, nationalist zealotry, an aborted secularization dynamics as well as the conflicted traditions of museological representations in the Philippines.