Barengasse Museum, Zurich, Switzerland 

4 October  to  7 December, 2013

 

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Maybe in Another Universe presents two politically attentive works by Mark Salvatus (born 1980), a Manila based artist whose practice moves between video, installation and social enquiry. Salvatus has exhibited widely across Asia, Oceania and Europe, including the 3rd Singapore Biennale, the 4th Guangzhou Triennial, the Koganecho Bazaar in Yokohama and the Jakarta Biennale XIV. His work attends to the infrastructures of everyday life, the informal geographies of mobility and the ways images store social time.

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The exhibition brings together Souvenirs (2013) and Current Affair$ (2014) to consider migration, remittance and memory within the longer history of the Philippine diaspora. In Souvenirs Salvatus acquires his uncle’s laptop and encounters a vernacular archive of photographs and video fragments gathered during twenty four years at sea. The work treats these files as minor monuments, intimate records that disclose how private technologies become repositories of global movement and how maritime labour inscribes itself within family memory. Rather than extract spectacle, Salvatus preserves the texture of ordinary documentation. The piece asks how domestic archives migrate into public testimony, how kinship becomes cartography, and how attention can operate as a form of care.

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Current Affair$ extends this enquiry by tracing the social life of money. The work reflects on the anthropology and sociology of remittance economies in a country where overseas employment is a structural condition rather than an exception. It follows the routes through which value travels and maps the affective traffic that accompanies it. Money appears as a conduit of attachment and as an instrument of discipline. Images and sounds assemble a poetics of circulation in which exchange rates, news cycles and household routines converge. The result is a portrait of diaspora as a system that reaches into the grain of daily life, reorganising time, obligation and hope.

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Together the two videos articulate a method that is both analytical and humane. Salvatus turns the screen into a civic room where biography and political economy speak at the same time. The works operate at the junction of micro history and world system, a perspective that reads personal memory alongside the larger forces that shape it (Appadurai 1996). Sea routes, contracts and port cities index a global regime of labour, yet they remain legible here through the cadence of a single family’s archive. The exhibition invites viewers to practise slow looking, to consider how images act as evidence, and to recognise the migrant not as abstract data but as a subject whose life composes a dispersed household and a distributed nation (Parreñas 2001; Hondagneu Sotelo 1994).

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The title, Maybe in Another Universe, names a hope that is at once modest and radical. It imagines a world in which a viable life does not require departure, where safety and dignity are possible at home. The phrase also acknowledges the double bind of aspiration under globalisation. It recognises how futures are made elsewhere and how longing itself becomes work, a labour of imagination performed across distance and time (Berlant 2011; Tadiar 2009). Rather than sentimentalise displacement, the exhibition stages a disciplined tenderness. It holds open a space in which attention, description and reciprocity can become ethical practices.

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Formally the works mobilise what might be called a documentary of the minor. They foreground fragments, filenames, desktop folders and the small gestures of editing. In doing so they echo a turn in visual culture toward the vernacular archive and toward media that record the world while participating in it. The ordinary becomes method. The laptop appears as vessel and ledger, the video timeline as itinerary, the cut as a way to think. Such choices align with a broader revaluation of evidence in contemporary art, where the aesthetics of indexing and the politics of citation are understood as part of the work of world making (Azoulay 2019; Steyerl 2009).

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Maybe in Another Universe proposes no simple resolution. It offers instead a repertoire of tools that communities already use and that cultural practice can refine. To look with care. To read the economies that pass through households. To understand that remembrance is a social technology. To accept that belonging can be rehearsed even when it is lived at a distance. If another universe remains a wish, the exhibition suggests that this one can still be widened through attention, solidarity and the patient craft of description.

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Selected references

• Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

• Azoulay, Ariella A. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso, 2019.

• Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

• Hondagneu Sotelo, Pierrette. Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

• Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

• Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e flux journal 10, 2009.

• Tadiar, Neferti X. M. Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.