Room 002.21
Do You Remember the Philippines?

As a last stronghold of overseas colonies, the Philippines remained under Spanish administration until 1898, when it began to orbit around new powers: the USA and later Japan. It is perhaps one of the forgotten cases in reflections around colonialism, despite being a State still submerged in a semi-colonial reality.

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Room 002.21 Room 002.21
Room 002.21 Room 002.21

Room 002.21

As a last stronghold of overseas colonies, the Philippines remained under Spanish administration until 1898, when it began to orbit around new powers: the USA and later Japan. It is perhaps one of the forgotten cases in reflections around colonialism, despite being a State still submerged in a semi-colonial reality. Its geographical location, the progressive disappearance of the Spanish language and the State’s lack of geostrategic interest in the area, preferring other geographical territories such as Latina America, could constitute some of the factors in this process, along with the archipelago representing a kind of national anti-symbol: the reality of the end of dreams and narratives glorifying the former project of a Spanish empire.

Recently, different artists, from both the country and the former colony, have focused on the distressing trails left by the effects of colonialism in the Philippines. Therefore, the room explores, on the one hand, Spanish traces in contemporary Philippines, searching for the footprints of the Hispanic colonial conquista of the past and its cultural miscegenation with a minority opposed to present-day globalisation; and, on the other, a more strictly contemporary phenomenon, yet one in which the echoes of the past still resonate: the guerrilla movements combining the ideological and the intimate and a new co-existence shaped by the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous around a revolutionary project which seeks the definitive emancipation of the territory.

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