The Anting Anting Project

Postscript

What I hope to explore in this open-ended project is the anting-anting, a mystical amulet deeply rooted in Philippine folk Catholic practices. Empowered by secret rituals, they impart on their owners superhero-like abilities ranging from invisibility, incredible strength, and imperviousness to bullets. The anting-anting make an appearance in almost every great hero myth of the archipelago’s history, closely tying them to concepts of revolution, freedom, and personal agency. They are an animist’s response to colonialism— a quixotic but still potent source of hope among swaths of Filipinos.

Of course, the asset that the colonialists fought so hard over—territory— is not something they fight over anymore. Land itself is fairly meaningless these days. What has replaced it is time. The richest companies in the world are measured by how much of our time they control. If you think that’s untrue, note that when Netflix’s value crashed recently, it wasn’t over profits, but over the loss of a small number of subscribers and the time they represented. Once a population’s attention moves on, money moves with it.

I hope to use the metaphor of the anting-anting to pry open our current existential state, entranced as we are by screens and mediated entertainment experiences. We need new kinds of superpowers to resist the onslaught of forces intent on turning us into individual consumption points on a marketing plan. The amulets I am currently making are made of capiz shell, a traditional Philippine material, with imagery engraved into it with a laser. Like traditional anting anting they are meant to be held close to the body, worn as necklaces or within easy reach of the hand. These are meant to be talismans of contemplation, whose surface of smooth waves and deep cuts rub pleasingly against the fingertips.

What I am trying to do here is develop a new iconography cast in new materials, around an unprecedented and poorly considered set of problems. My hope is to create objectified, physical responses to our increasingly virtual existence. These objects are meant to relate to the body in touch, feel, texture. They are cognitive through the surface of the skin as much as the cornea of the eyes. Disturbed, incised surfaces intersect and recombine, manipulated by the movements of the fingers into more subtle visual forms, disturbing the patterns of digital engagement that are shaping our lives.

Come on in, the waters of oblivion are fine

The objects and the stories that orbited around these amulets barely registered with the colonists. Among the thousands of rice god figures, spoons, suits of armour, and swords collected and catalogued in American and European museums that we see on Mapping Philippine Material Culture where I act as designer and developer, there are maybe 10 anting anting. The Christian and Masonic iconography cast into these tuppence sized metal objects perhaps lacked the exoticism sought after by those early anthropologists.

But as I look them now I see these talismans are meant to provide the same kind of protection against the compulsions that overcome us, swimming in the waters of anxiety and boredom and entertainment as a stream of images and thoughts drip into our consciousness, a foetid stream we can’t stop drinking from, but desperately want to. The power to master this flood of the new, the unfamiliar, the endlessly intriguing, is as overwhelming to us as it must have been to the Filipinos, who embraced and loathed the abrasive garments, the alabaster skin, the singular God. So much of what they knew and felt had become forbidden or ridiculed. In these environments, the anting anting were and can be symbols of hope that what we value now will not become worthless or buried in the future.

Still our critical and overwrought natures can’t help but render the creation of these things sisyphean in nature, but my thought is that encountering the anting anting will be like Sisyphus encountering his stone yet again, when he becomes conscious of his task, and carries on despite it all. One of my strongest, most heartfelt beliefs is that these emergent, virtual systems that feed our every compulsion will be irresistible and will change everything. What we are left with is the sovereignty of our own minds and the shrinking islands of time we claim for ourselves.