“The Truthfulness Lies in the Process, Not the Outcome” Using Artistic Practices to Further Truth-Telling and Memorialization in the Philippines

Abstract

The Philippines have never known a unified state-sanctioned narrative about the violence that happened during the Marcos dictatorship. In order to resist ongoing disinformation campaigns that seek to erase evidence and memories of past violence, various institutional and civil society actors are currently initiating interventions in the domain of truth and memorialization. Notably, artists, curators, and creative professionals are engaging in various kinds of so-called ‘narrative documentation’ and ‘narrative change-making’. Several of these initiatives mobilize spatial dynamics and co-created processes to facilitate more complex forms of truth-telling and memorialization, which foreground complexity and ambiguity, and which prompt more engaged forms of truth-listening. This article zooms in on a specific project that mobilizes traditional artisan and artistic techniques and forms to revisit women’s experiences of historical and ongoing violence by crafting layered and ambiguous narratives about harm. In doing so, the Weaving Women’s Words on Wounds of War project seeks to further memorialization, truth-telling, and truth-listening about gendered violence. Through an analysis embedded in scholarship on memory, truth, and artistic practice, I argue that it is the generation of ambiguous and complex narratives that invites an active and relational type of engagement and listening. This holds potential for resisting the erasure of complex forms of violence, both in the context of the Philippines, as well as in other contexts where truth or memorialization initiatives may be incapable of capturing the gravity of lived experiences of violence or of facilitating genuine listening.