Book Section
Pio Abad
The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders
Reconstruction as ‘Democratic Gesture’
This paper focuses on an ongoing project that began in 2012, entitled The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders. This project is an attempt to reconstitute the Marcos Collection. Sourced from auction catalogues, museum archives, and scant government records, their lavish inventory of commissioned portraits, jewellery, Regency silverware, and old master paintings is reproduced as photographic installations, postcards, and three-dimensional prints. Reconstruction, in this instance, becomes a sustained democratic gesture, allowing an increasingly forgetful public to access a collection that has remained unavailable through a systemic failure by successive post-dictatorial governments to institutionalize collective acts of remembering.
Keywords: Philippine history; collective memory; dictatorships; historical reconstruction
| Title |
The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders
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| Subtitle |
Reconstruction as ‘Democratic Gesture’
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| Author(s) |
Pio Abad
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| Identifier | |
| Description |
This paper focuses on an ongoing project that began in 2012, entitled The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders. This project is an attempt to reconstitute the Marcos Collection. Sourced from auction catalogues, museum archives, and scant government records, their lavish inventory of commissioned portraits, jewellery, Regency silverware, and old master paintings is reproduced as photographic installations, postcards, and three-dimensional prints. Reconstruction, in this instance, becomes a sustained democratic gesture, allowing an increasingly forgetful public to access a collection that has remained unavailable through a systemic failure by successive post-dictatorial governments to institutionalize collective acts of remembering.
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| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Berlin
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| Publisher |
ICI Berlin Press
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| Date |
4 January 2022
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| Subject |
Philippine history
collective memory
dictatorships
historical reconstruction
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| Rights |
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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| Language |
en-GB
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| page start |
37
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| page end |
46
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| Source |
Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 37–46
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References
- Davies, Nick, ‘The $10bn Question: What Happened to the Marcos Millions’, Guardian, 7 May 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/10bn-dollar-question-marcos-millions-nick-davies> [accessed 22 February 2021]
- Flores, Patrick, ‘Total Community Response: Performing the Avant-Garde as a Democratic Gesture in Manila’, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, 1.1 (2017), pp. 13–38 <https://doi.org/10.1353/sen.2017.0001>
- Rafael, Vicent, ‘Patronage and Pornography: Ideology and Spectatorship in the Early Marcos Years’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32.3 (1990) <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500016492>
Cite as:
Pio Abad, ‘The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders: Reconstruction as “Democratic Gesture”’, in Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 37-46 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-21_05>