To our esteemed Chancellor Fidel R. Nemenzo, to our guest of honor, UP President Danilo Concepcion, to our dean, Prof. Marc San Valentin, to the college executive board, to the faculty members, to my fellow graduating students, and to friends and family, good afternoon to you all.
Radical. People tend to shy away from that word, deeming it to be far too abrasive and harsh for the trappings of civil society. It evokes images of bloodshed and violence, a disruption of the ever-so fragile peace of our daily lives.
However, as Gene Lacza Pilapil wrote in the Philippine Collegian’s June 21, 1988 issue, “To the uninitiated, reality would seem unreal. Political repression and economic violence appear like extremist terms for those born with silver spoons in their mouths and fed daily with comfortable illusions. Radicalism makes reality real by making it obvious. What the world kills and buries, radicalism unearths and uses as evidence for the former’s indictment. It is power through knowledge. We change reality in accordance with our knowledge of it. We demand justice only when we find out there is injustice. We struggle for freedom when we become conscious of our unfreedom.”
To put it more succinctly, we must be as radical as reality itself.
And after the political upheaval and economic crises brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and in the aftermath of an election through which the son of a dictator managed to force his way back into power, we as a college have and continue to live out radicalism in both theory and practice.
From colorful murals in Katipunan and on the walls of our very own college, to the graffiti we’ve spray-painted along the streets of Morayta, we’ve spoken truth to power by reclaiming urban spaces in our own way. In various protests, we’ve paraded and burned grotesque effigies as symbolic punishment to the dictators and despots who have sacrificed other people’s lives at the altar of power.
All of that rage comes vis-à-vis with love. We sang, laughed, and danced with the members of the Lumad community when they stayed in the university for their Bakwit School. We set up community pantries in Maginhawa and in our own barangays, we’ve launched donation drives, and have done community service and commissions for various causes.
Even with our own plates and personal artworks, down to the way we lived our lives as students in Fine Arts, we’ve continuously challenged the status quo by continuously reinterrogating and reframing the truths of the world. Through our plates we’ve explored gender and sexuality, we’ve attempted to configure our uneasy position as a Third World Formation, we’ve questioned what it means to be human as well as the very nature of the human condition. We slept on the hallways and we painted on the walls of Bartlett Hall, we smoked inside of our classrooms, we hurled ceramics on the “F.U. Wall” and spent our lunches drinking at Sarah’s.
Radicalism is our way of life, and it is through that way of life that we paved the path for where we stand today as graduates: it is the road less traveled.
Despite all of the blood, sweat, and tears shed in order for us to get to where we are, the son of a dictator is still in power. It sounds like a bittersweet ending, barely a victory—if it can be even called a victory at all. But the reality is that graduation is neither of those things—there is no pomp under these dire circumstances. Clean-cut, decisive endings are but a myth—life is much more complicated, much messier than a novel or film with a definitive exposition and denouement—and perhaps more importantly, there are no victories to be had if there are those who are left behind. We have no choice but to continue to be radical, not in spite of but because we’re leaving this college.
And who can deny the radical power of our craft? Art is a form of political discourse. It has the capacity to alter the discursive frames through which we negotiate the political. It can depict imaginations of the political—political knowledge itself is produced through art. But perhaps most importantly, as we’ve shown throughout our stay in UP, art is our witness.
As difficult as this journey throughout college may have been, this only marks the end of a chapter and not of the story. Carrying everything we’ve imbibed from our professors, from the College of Fine Arts, the university itself, the community, and from each other, dissent becomes duty: it becomes our duty as the artista ng bayan to create meaningful change in a world mired in chaos and conflict.
This graduation is neither a victory nor an ending—it is a challenge and a wake-up call, for we can and will not fiddle as Rome burns. As Ai Weiwei said, “Art must fight for freedom or the whole world is a prison. Some things are whole only when they shatter.” ●
This address was delivered during the 32nd Tanglaw ng Sining of the UP College of Fine Arts last July 30. Yutuc, who graduated summa cum laude, was the editor-in-chief of the publication for academic year 2020-2021, and is currently serving as its graphics editor.
