Phantasma
Presented as part of the Snare for Birds: Rereading the Colonial Archive exhibition in the Philippines, August 2023 – January 2024.
Phantasma takes its name from something almost incidental: the ghost figures that surface in the margins of colonial photographs, the blurred second bodies left by an underexposed negative. Light that never quite reached the frame. The series began, and keeps beginning, in the Library of Congress's photographic archive of the Philippine-American War, in the presence of one image especially: a stereograph, Filipino prisoners of war at Pasig, Philippine Islands, its subjects unnamed, its publisher credited and copyrighted. The archive remembers who owned the picture. It does not remember who is in it. Ariella Azoulay's writing on the archive as something more than a neutral place of storage — a structure that decides, in advance, who gets to be seen and how — has been a quiet companion to this asymmetry, though the drawings do not try to resolve it so much as sit inside it (Azoulay 2019).
To draw, here, is slower than to look. It is closer to what Jasamin Kashanipour calls a gradual gaze, a way of letting the pace of the hand interrupt the speed of an extractive glance (Kashanipour 2021). Lucy Cotter's sense of artistic research, where she asserts that it can produce its own knowledge, rather than only illustrate what is already known, feels less like a method claimed here than a permission taken (Cotter 2019). Charcoal, then wax, then chalk: each material change marks a shift not in argument but in intimacy, an attempt to get closer to something the archive was never built to hold.
One drawing works in white wax on kraft paper, reversing the usual weight of figure and ground, so that what is normally background — the whiteness that both exposes and withholds — becomes what the eye has to sit with. It is one way of being inside what Du Bois called double consciousness: watching yourself be watched (Du Bois 1903). The drawings return, again and again, to the subjects the archive called "prisoners," "specimens," "before" and "after" — trying not to correct that record so much as keep company with the people in it, with something like the attentiveness Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot describes wanting for the subjects of her own portraits: to be seen, and scrutinized, and still met with generosity (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis 1997). Elsewhere, the drawings turn toward the present — a 2021 shooting in Atlanta finds its way into a portrait already occupied with the surveillance of women of color — and toward other image-makers, Charles White's insistence on picturing Black life beyond victimhood among them.
None of this is offered as resolution. If there is a word for what these drawings are reaching toward, it may be closer to Adolfo Albán Achinte's re-existence — not the language of resistance exactly, but something quieter and more ongoing: the work of redefining dignity from within the very structures that withheld it, without waiting for permission or proof (Albán Achinte 2013).
References
Albán Achinte, Adolfo. "Pedagogías de la re-existencia: artistas indígenas y afrocolombianos." In Pedagogías decoloniales: Prácticas insurgentes de resistir, (re)existir y (re)vivir, Tomo I, edited by Catherine Walsh, 443–468. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2013.
Art Institute of Chicago. Charles White: A Retrospective. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2018.
Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso, 2019.
Cotter, Lucy, ed. Reclaiming Artistic Research. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2019.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903.
Kashanipour, Jasamin. "The Gradual Gaze: Drawing as a Practice of Ethnographic Description." Anthropology and Humanism 46, no. 1 (2021): 81–94.
Lawrence-Lightfoot, Sara, and Jessica Hoffmann Davis. The Art and Science of Portraiture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997.
Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.