In the Philippines’ turbulent political landscape, speaking out invites surveillance, censorship, and red-tagging. Whether it be in criticism of state violence, labor exploitation, or land dispossession, activists are barricaded and mobilizations are intercepted alongside online trolling. But amid these pressures, art emerges as a strong medium for public action.
Through poetry, placards, murals, street theater, and effigies, artists spotlight injustice. As they shine light on the struggles of marginalized sectors, they stage the nation’s issues in the public eye, where they are impossible to ignore.
Where art finds the masses
Before protests flood the streets, paint is prepared, paper is repurposed, and performances are rehearsed wherever space can be reclaimed. Through art, struggle emerges before it is understood, and resistance rallies long before the first chant.
For Zenaida Ilao (I, AB-PLM), chair of Panday Sining Rektikano, this began with writing. Deprived of the space to speak while growing up, she tucked her voice into poetry and prose until Panday Sining widened her private expression into graphic design, balatenggas, and exhibits made with the masses in mind. More than aesthetics, “Art should be something that exposes the living conditions of the people,” Ilao imparts.
Arlo De Guzman, artistic director of Dulaang UP, approaches theater with the same purpose. He describes his practice as “necessary theater,” responding to its time and place and prompting audiences to ask their own questions.
This conviction moves from the page to the body in the work of Ashley Caballero, a member of Umalohokan Inc. at the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB). Caballero found theater through Isko’t Iska, an annual production that stages stories he describes as “mula sa masa, tungo sa masa.” Through community theater, they carry the realities of development aggression directly to the pavement—liberating the struggles of farmers from ticketed halls and back to the people who live them.
(…from the masses to the masses.)
For these artists, art becomes political when it seeks the people it speaks of, when it can be held in the hand, raised in the street, set alight, and carried forward into struggle.
Counter creation
The act of creation inherently carries risk; this is all the more true for the provocative work that these artists put out into the world.
Even the University perpetuates this truth. Ilao shares that the security guards often inspect or even prevent organization members from bringing rally placards into campus.
Meanwhile, in UPLB, the award-winning Umalohokan remains unrecognized as a significant “cultural or varsity organization,” and is excluded from the budgetary support afforded to such groups. Still, Umalohokan stages radical recitals whenever and wherever possible. A striking image from their Mayo Uno street performance this year was a hammer and sickle piercing the air above a dramatic scene of trampled workers set against a sea of red, the swell of live rock music, and fervent calls for labor rights.
But as photos of their performance featuring the communist symbol circulated online, Umalohokan found itself in the crosshairs of hostility. “Ang mensahe lang naman ng karit at maso ay ang saligang alyansa ng mga magsasaka at manggagawa,” Caballero explains. But on social media, this did not reach those who could appreciate their message. “Pinutakti ng trolls at red-tagging comments ang mga post.”
(The hammer and sickle simply represent the alliance between farmers and workers. The posts were swarmed with trolls and red-tagging comments.)
Limitations with resources and manpower also hinder activists’ efforts to bring demonstrations to reality. For Amber Blumentritt of Ugatlahi Artist Collective, the collaborative nature of creating effigies often weakens in execution, due to the lack of people able to materialize their creative visions.
In dire times, creation necessitates resourcefulness. Insisting that the most urgent art belongs where the people already are, the collective creates for public spaces rather than galleries or paid venues. Through fundraising sales, donation drives, and the use of cheap, recycled materials, these artists prove what it means to make boundless what is scarce and to liberate those deprived.
Ultimately, activists have no choice but to rise above these challenges. “Despite all the repression, we need to remember, who do we do this for?” Ilao muses. “Who is the art for, essentially?”
Everyone is an artist
With urgent hands, their work consistently returns to its subject audience. Proving that art is necessary, Ilao explains their work is “so that the farmers won’t have to have their lands taken away, so that the fishermen won’t have to have their waters taken away, so that our workers don’t have to resort to exploitative labor while also getting a minimum wage that’s not livable.”
But when survival outranks expression, artists are policed by stripping the masses of the space to create. As Blumentritt points out, “Sila talaga yung inagawan ng space para maging artist.”
(They are the ones who have been deprived of the space to become artists.)
Thus, Blumentritt highlights the importance of involving different sectors in conceptualization. “The ideas come from them because they experience these local issues firsthand,” she stresses in Filipino.
With the people in mind, Caballero reinforces the power of rehearsing in public. Under these conditions, artists blend the fine line between creative production and social responsibility. Caballero emphasizes, “Mahalaga na matatampok natin yung [pagkilos] ng mga masang anak pawis at dun sa representasyon na naipakita [at] tinatanggap.”
(It’s important that we highlight the movement of the toiling masses… and through the representation that has been shown [and] become accepted.)
Art, then, rightfully returns to the streets, where it is most accessible to the voices that fuel its revolutionary fire. As Blumentritt puts it, it is a reclamation of visibility in spaces from elite-controlled venues, emphasizing that activist art marks where people already belong. “Kasi ‘pag gumawa tayo ng art na hindi naman natin pinapakita sa kalsada, sino pang makakakita sa inyo?”
(Because if we make art that we won’t show in the streets, who else will see you?)
