Words John Alexis B. Balaguer
Images Load na Dito
Portraits Gerome Soriano
I got lost three times on my way to independent curator Mayumi Hirano’s residence in Cubao. I must admit I was embarrassed. The resident-studio-art space located at 98B Dioquino St., Cubao has been a popular destination among contemporary art circles since 2012 ever since Mayumi and her husband, visual artist Mark Salvatus, settled here and opened the space for community art events. I finally arrived in the quiet neighborhood and was about to miss the place, until the couple called out my name from across the street. Since the pandemic, they have not received any visitors other than colleague and friend, visual artist Gerome Soriano who was here playing with Mayumi and Mark’s son Yoji. I immediately felt right at home.
I first met Mayumi (Miss, as I like to call her) in 2019 at the University of the Philippines as my instructor in graduate school for Art Studies where she is a senior lecturer. Since then, we have collaborated on some projects under their artistic and research initiative Load na Dito (the initiative’s name references the local top-up system for cellphone credit). Initiated in 2016, they have organized and co-organized a wide range of programs including exhibitions, interviews, talks, workshops, artist residencies, and publications as “load” or energy credits concerning the practice of contemporary art.
Mayumi had not always lived in Manila. She was born in Osaka, Japan, and completed her Master’s degree in Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. While doing curatorial work in Yokohama in 2011, she met Mark who was an artist-in-residence visiting the country. “Before meeting him, I didn’t know much about the Philippines, to be honest,” Mayumi shares as we settle down in their receiving area. I noticed a cat napping beside her. “So the first time I came to visit Manila, Mark took me around and introduced me to the artists and his friends who are active in the art scene, but I met them as friends of my then-boyfriend. I think it was a good entry because I didn’t start with a professional relationship with the Philippines or with the people here. It was a more personal encounter.”
The notion of the “personal” seems to circulate in Mayumi’s practice. As an independent curator, researcher, and translator, her work denies the expected categorizations of the professional field and instead opens the possibilities of collaboration and exploration of cultural approaches to openly engage and understand the practices and contexts around art and curatorial practice. “I was working as a curator in 2008 to 2013 in Koganecho Bazaar in Yokohama, but it was also not like a white-cube type of institution. It was artist residencies slash art festival, and I worked a lot with the local communities. I was basically doing everything and that’s how I define my practice still: it’s not boxed in ‘curator’ or ‘manager’ but doing all kinds of engagements. The idea of the translator or interpreter is also part of this practice because I am able to translate the artists’ language to the local community. That’s how I see my role in the art ecosystem.”
Her first project organized in the Philippines as the newlyweds settled in Cubao in 2012 was under the artist-run initiative 98B COLLABoratory where she was a co-founder. Mayumi, who was working back and forth from Manila and Osaka, had organized Japanese artists to be brought to Manila under the initiative’s micro-residency. “This was an important project for me to facilitate this type of dialogue as it was also a homemade kind of residency,” Mayumi shares, referring to the contexts of both countries. “Being involved in 98B, I was still able to apply the practice that I was doing in Yokohama, but here, it was not about money. In a way I felt a little more equal with the artists I worked with—I can say what I’m thinking, and the conversation was always there. That’s when I started to wonder about the question of collaborations. I learned a lot from this being in-between. That was my transition.”
From 2012 to 2018, Mayumi, Mark, and the members of the initiative with its physical space established in Escolta developed creative, critical, and collaborative programs including mounting spatial projects and exhibitions, screenings of video works, artist residencies, resource sharing, talks, and even art bazaars. However, in 2019, the couple moved out of 98B and turned over the initiative due to the challenges of having to maintain the space and support its members while moving back and forth to two countries, as well as facing the demands of their expanding work and growing family.
As the family grew, the notions of being home and work also shifted. Load na Dito became Mayumi’s space for possibility and inquiry. “Load na Dito also started as a personal practice to unlearn the conventional notions, roles, and values of family,” Mayumi says. “It is a way for us to continue acknowledging the differences between us as individuals and find ways to live together.” While its space and site is the Dioquino St. residence, it is run without having a permanent space in order to keep projects unbound to a specific location. The initiative covers a wide scope of artistic and curatorial projects which include circulations of exhibitions, interviews, talks, workshops, performances, artist residencies, and publications.
In one of its projects “Kabit at Sabit” from May 2019, artists were invited to mount their projects in varying locations all over the country and abroad. Sites included Metro Manila, Cagayan de Oro, Dumaguete, Negros Occidental, to Venice, Italy, and more, with different opening schedules throughout its duration. The series of pop-up exhibitions challenged the notions of art in permanence, whereby the simultaneous installations in multiple locations allowed for an evocation of connection despite their individual activations, physical distance, and time differences.
In February 2020, Load na Dito presented “Ghost and Host” at Art Fair Philippines. The exhibition by artists Neo Maestro, Denver Garza, and Gerome Soriano presented collaborative installation work, paintings under mattresses, conversation and counseling as performance, and participatory games. Breaking away from the conventional forms of commercial art collection, the exhibition was a much-needed refresher from the monolith that is the art fair market. At the onset of the pandemic, Load na Dito presented virtual programs including “Stop Over” supported by Japan Foundation, which was a series of conversations with artists, curators, and cultural workers about their daily experiences as practitioners in relation to specific locations such as home, studio, or neighborhood as a way to recreate studio visits online.
Mayumi described her work and practice as many things: as independent curator, researcher, translator, facilitator, and collaborator, but these roles now may not separate from their personal iterations. In the course of the pandemic, the notion of spaces has become liminal and hybrid with functions, ranging from professional to personal, to physical and virtual. Since focusing on virtual programs in Load na Dito, Mayumi has decided to have separate work locations from Mark so their conversations do not echo in online meetings. She thus converted their old laundry room on the third floor as her workstation, the personal and professional boundaries expanding.
“I don’t necessarily have a set of practice that I have to continue, but there are sets of values I want to keep,” Mayumi expresses. I suddenly found myself feeling more at home, propping my leg up on the couch in eagerness as we came to discuss her anchors as a curatorial organizer. “What I think I hold up in question is the disciplinary distinction between curating and management. And I think it should be one. In this global art market, it just gets divided because one has to be focusing on the content, another has to do marketing or promotion […] but I think these two have to be combined together. I’m trying to think of exhibition-making or art practice from the inside out. Can we reverse the way we practice? It’s still a little bit abstract for me, but I start with something that’s more definable or something that we need to address.”
Our conversation drifted to the relevance of art curatorship in terms of its role in community and service prospects. In her opening essay in the publication Please… Use Other Door: Another Look at Exhibition Making, where she was the editor, Mayumi writes: “While curatorial work is expected to meet the standards and the desires of the international art community, it also has to address the demands of the local community with respect to their daily life, cultural values, and the moral economy.” I read this out loud in our conversation appreciating its profoundness. It follows: “The ability to translate, mediate, and facilitate shapes the foundation of art managerial practice. It requires a critical perspective supported by the study of aesthetics as well as sincere respect for others and the will to act with compassion. Unlike the image of the pristine white cube, the stage for art management is set in an entangled social sphere of conflicting values and emotions which constantly questions the meaning of ‘art.’ In this social space, the aesthetic contract is aimed toward protecting not the prescribed definition and value of art, but the agreement to secure a safe space for expressing and recognizing each other’s reactions, whether it is resistance or curiosity when encountering unfamiliar ideas. I believe this discursive space opens up a venue to not just reconsider such distinctions as ‘high art’ and ‘popular culture’ or ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness,’ but to recognize both the centrality of structure as the classificatory and discriminatory mechanism, as well as, our individual capacity and will to transcend, shape, and reshape the limits of structures and the power of institutional formations.”
She props herself up as I finish reading. “I feel like making an exhibition for me has become a little bit problematic because there are so many things that we have to hide from making exhibitions,” Mayumi says, noting how her experience and observations of art institutional structures have caused often-unjust treatments in the ground level. “That’s why I feel the need to expand its boundaries.”
As we wrap up, Mayumi offers drinks to me, Mark, and Gerome in their garage-studio area. She asks about my interests in energy work and shares that she also practiced Tai Chi some years back. Mark shows me some of his archived works as well as gifted items from friends and colleagues, and Gerome gives gamer advice to young Yoji who is completing a level in his mobile game. Later, they are visiting the dentist so Yoji can have his teeth cleaned.
I have found in my some years of professional practice that the art world could be difficult to navigate, sometimes compromising my own humaneness with the demands of the art world system or the select few in powerful positions. The art world, though it does not look like it, can be an increasingly political and even violent field that is often laden with gate-keeping, unequal opportunities, and toxic labor cultures.
Mayumi and her family in 98B Dioquino St. espouse such powerful possibilities in the art world: compassion, care, and a sense of home. Home could be a place to feel safe, to be with loved ones, a place to grow old together, to live, laugh, and learn–and yet it is not bounded by physical space. Despite the uncertainties and challenges posed by our contemporary personal or professional realities, a sense of home is something we make as we find grounding in our calling. “Maybe there is a destiny that we carry because here in the Philippines, it is not an easy place to be,” says Mayumi, the sleeping cat beside her sound and in place. “So maybe it’s a destiny.” •
John Alexis Balaguer is an independent art manager, critic, and art curator based in Manila. He is the founder of Curare Art Space, a digital space for curatorial collaboration. He was formerly operations manager and head of research at Palacio de Memoria, a heritage house turned arts and events center; curatorial writer and researcher at Ayala Museum, writing for exhibitions and publications, and acting as managing editor for the museum magazine; and gallery manager at Archivo 1984 gallery. He received the Loyola Schools Award for the Arts in 2012, the Purita Kalaw Ledesma Award for Art Criticism in 2019, and was the proponent of the heritage project which was awarded the Philippine Heritage Award for Adaptive Reuse in 2021. He studied AB Communication – Film and Media Studies, and Minor in Creative Writing – Poetry in Ateneo de Manila University, and is currently an MA Art Studies – Curatorial Studies candidate at University of the Philippines, Diliman. He currently contributes art writing and criticism to Art Asia Pacific magazine, and Kanto.com.ph.
