Remembrance as Resistance: Archie Oclos’ TAO

It was a sunny afternoon in Coney Island, New York, when visual artist Archie Oclos took us around Luna Park to try the famous Nathan’s hot dogs and stroll along the seaside boulevards. The neighborhood in Brooklyn was the largest U.S. amusement area from the 1880s to WWII, attracting millions annually. The most well-known of the entertainment area, Luna Park (1903), was the forerunner of the amusement park chain and was one of three major Coney Island parks, alongside Steeplechase and Dreamland. We made our way under the colorful ferris wheels and rides that have since been halted for the winter, unknowingly walking over defiled land. For the last couple of months, for his Individual Fellowship with the Asian Cultural Council, Oclos has been researching the historical exploitation and dehumanization of the Igorot people in staged exhibitions on the island in the early 20th century.

Titled TAO: Unveiling the Dark History of Displayed and Staged Filipinos – Memory, Representation, Resistance, Oclos has unveiled their stories in eight site-specific works in acrylic on board, invoking their memories in the land via archival research, photography, video, and animation. These spectral, ephemeral installations in major locations in Coney Island and Washington, explore the narratives of Philippine indigenous peoples in the United States, challenging the modern history of oppression in the guise of civilization, examining the Philippine and American estrangements, othering, and the performance of identity-formations at the turn of the century.

In the spring of 1905, Coney Island hosted the Igorot Village exhibition, showcasing over fifty indigenous Filipinos from Bontoc, Mountain Province of the Philippines. Coney Island’s Igorot Village however, was not the first display of indigenous peoples of its kind. In 1904, at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition hosted in St. Louis, Missouri, a “Philippine Reservation” human zoo was also built on the fairground.  Led by former physician and war veteran turned showman Truman Hunt, who then was the U.S. administrator in Bontoc province, the exhibition in the entertainment capital of New York aimed to “educate” the American public about the Philippines, then a recent U.S. territory following the Philippine Revolution against Spain, and the Philippine-American War.

Installed at the main entrance of Luna Park, Oclos’ Hunt(ed), the first site intervention in the series, is an acrylic piece that reimagines a photograph of Truman Hunt with five Igorot men. Oclos’ shading is remarkable–the lines as shadows almost resembling wounds, but what stands out are the differences in the rendering of the eyes of the hunter and the hunted, in stark white and black respectively, highlighting Hunt’s moral blindness and the Igorots’ experiences of trauma. The work, installed against the white snow, puts in the forefront Hunt’s exploitation, who built mock villages and made them perform for crowds in decontextualized conditions, as part of America’s imperialistic gaze.

Also based on a 1905 photograph from Coney Island, The Girl Without A Balloon depicts a young indigenous girl physically restrained, and surrounded by formally dressed American spectators. In record, over a thousand visitors came to the Igorot Village, including President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, who would embark on a diplomatic tour of Asia with William Howard Taft, her father’s presidential successor, which included a stay in the Philippines.  The work is installed in a thick layer of snow, with the ferris wheel as panopticon in the distance. The title borrows directly from the wealthy and well-known street-artist whose anti-establishment and anti-capitalist themes critics argue as contradictory to the high prices his works fetch at auctions. Unlike the child in Banksy’s artwork however, who experiences the loss of something precious, Oclos’ girl here holds no agency—her hands bound with bamboo and rope, and reduced to an object of colonial curiosity.

Oclos further reflects on the physicality of this suppression in Itak sa Puso ng Katutubo. Inspired by Antipas Delotavo’s “Itak sa Puso ni Mang Juan” (1978), Oclos’ work features an indigenous man from a 1905 photograph, performing a ritual dance–yet interrupted by a sharp, dagger-like corporate emblem. By invoking corporate advertising as symbols of dominance, the work highlights the clash between colonial spectacle and consumer culture, particularly in Coney Island, where the hot dog symbolized progress, industrial efficiency, and the ideals of American modernity and economy dominate over authenticity.

Similarly, in Kalam ng Sikmura, Oclos presents one particular suffering the Igorots faced.  Drawing on a red single-use plastic cup, the work hints at the hunger and deprivation experienced by the Igorots, stripped of their traditional diets and forced to eat unfamiliar, inadequate food, disrupting their health and forced to perform ceremonial cultural practices outside of their ritualistic contexts. The red cup, now examined slowly and deliberately offers no satisfying quencher, rather the reminder and reinforcement of the violent idea of being barbaric and uncivilized.

Oclos consciously makes an empathic judgement in It’s A Curse To Be Far Away From Home. The video slideshow of an acrylic on board piece repositions the experiences of the Bontoc peoples arriving in a foreign world, accompanied by the sound of crunching snow. Presented as a standee at various locations across the island’s entertainment district, the work contrasts the nature of standees—often used for photographic entertainment and temporary identity—with the concept of facelessness, symbolizing identity’s inevitable loss and erasure. This work evokes a kind of historical amnesia, where the suffering of those displayed is forgotten.

It is no shock then that in works like Abot-langit Oclos points towards those whose ideals this erasure originates from: in the piece, the Igorots are made to look up to the American showman. Drawing from a theatrical skit in the exhibitions where Filipinos were placed as childlike and subservient next to the taller Caucasians, Oclos retakes the gaze and adopts the perspective from below, highlighting how power is staged through manipulation of scale, framing, and perspective. In Filipino culture, “abot langit” (reaching the sky) symbolizes the desire for something distant and unattainable. Placed beneath the Steeplechase Face, the mascot of the iconic Coney Island amusement parks, the unsettling smile appears, subtly suggesting a tension between entertainment and brutality: who, in reality, is the true savage?

Outside of Coney Island, in Washington, Oclos positioned The Story Must Come Home as an intervention outside the Smithsonian Museum. The piece, an acrylic on board human brain in a glass jar, puts into display the Smithsonian’s controversial ethnographic collection of human remains. These remains, including brains of Filipinos, were displayed or stored under questionable ethical standards: dating back to the early 20th century, the collection peruses a colonial anthropological gaze, where human bodies of the non-white other were objectified for scientific curiosity, reinforcing racial differences. Oclos’ work urges institutions like the Smithsonian and others to confront their colonial histories and treat the remains of indigenous people with the dignity of humanity, if not by repatriating them to their rightful places of origin.

For his final piece, Si Puti sa Puting Kalupaan Sa Tapat ng Puting Palasyo, Oclos carefully arranges a series of acrylic-on-board images to depict a wandering white dog around the White House grounds. The work pays tribute to the Filipino mutt, often named for its color, while also addressing the derogatory labeling of Filipinos as savage dog-eaters since the time of human exhibitions. As the dog completes its journey through this hostile, foreign land, it smiles and relieves itself in front of the White House gates. Oclos shifts the focus from grand political institutions to the individual, prompting a deep reflection on power, identity, and the silenced stories of the small.

By the end of the Bontoc people’s time in Coney Island in September 1905, Truman Hunt’s unethical actions began to catch up with him. His exploitation of the Bontoc people prompted public outcry and led to a government investigation. Hunt was arrested, fled, but was eventually sentenced. Richard Schneidewind, a showman and Spanish-American War veteran, took over the exhibitions, though he too faced accusations of neglect and financial difficulties, which contributed to the deaths of several Igorots. In 1913, the U.S. government repatriated the remaining Igorot people, and the Philippine Assembly outlawed the exhibition of Filipino tribes people in 1914.

As the day came to an end, we made our way back to Oclos’ seaside studio, where he shared his thoughts on placemaking, historical intervention, and the artist’s role in using the street as a canvas. He said, “If you have a space, or any space, that can be your studio. That can be your gallery, that can be your museum.” I took some time to reflect on this idea—how traditional concepts of origin, foreignness, exhibition, representation, and identity have become weighed down by histories that represent only one perspective, and how, now, the bloodied land calls for deep healing.

As a final act of agency and perhaps personal closure, Oclos’ TAO, temporarily reimagined in site-specific interventions and eternalized online, brings to life the memories of those long gone, with the hope that our remembrance might inspire resistance. Ultimately, Oclos aims to donate the works and their stories to the institutions and individuals he worked with during his fellowship in the U.S., perhaps as a symbolic gesture to ensure that the focus shifts from memorializing their painful histories to one that honors the act of telling their stories—so that we may never forget. •

Sources

DeCicco, Theresa. “The Igorot Village of Coney Island.” Coney Island Museum, Coney Island Museum, 5 Nov. 2023, www.coneyislandmuseum.org/blog/the-igorot-village-of-coney-island.

Prentice, Claire. The Igorrote Tribe Traveled the World for Show and Made These Two Men Rich | Smithsonian, 14 Oct. 2014, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/igorrote-tribe-traveled-world-these-men-took-all-money-180953012/.

John Alexis B. Balaguer is a lecturer at the College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines – Diliman. He has over a decade of cultural work in galleries, museums, and heritage institutions, and is the founder and curator of Curare Art Space. Balaguer contributes art writing and criticism to publications such as ArtAsiaPacific, Kanto, Art+, and Ocula, and writes curatorial texts for galleries in Metro Manila. He received the Ateneo Art Award for Art Criticism in 2019 and was Writer-in-Residence at the Salzburg Art Association in 2024. Currently, he is a Fellow for Art Criticism at the Asian Cultural Council in New York for 2025.

This project / research is supported by the Asian Cultural Council, whose mission is to advance international dialogue, understanding, and respect through cultural exchange activities in Asia and the United States.