Runway x disorganising: Green Papaya Art Projects

The early 2000s are very different from the arts that we are experiencing now. Between me and Donna, we did things differently, which immediately put us in a situation where she was able to bring in her own network to Green Papaya, and I, naturally, brought my own network of artists too. At that time, contemporary dancers struggled in institutions like the Cultural Centre in the Philippines, which houses the national dance company, so there was a strong desire from dancers to get out of this situation. That’s how the small community of contemporary dancers started in Manila: they started to form their own communities and launched their own festivals outside the institutions.

During the 2000s, there weren’t that many galleries yet. Prior to that, the specific focus of the market was on featuring more senior artists, so there was no particular space for the younger generation to actually show or even play. This was one of the things that Papaya offered without the pressure that galleries had, which is primarily about sales. If you go to Manila now, there are so many galleries and there is a focus on the younger generation because some collectors see them as an easy investment. Visual artists in particular had Papaya as a space to play and to show things that weren’t particularly sellable. So it was a space, I guess, of freedom that these market institutions didn’t offer.

We opened up our space to contemporary dancers, sound artists, and musicians, who were not necessarily being produced by commercial labels. And we also opened up our space to video artists and filmmakers. The base of the community was composed of visual artists. We were supporting artists who were coming out from the universities because during the time no commercial gallery would take on fresh graduates. So alternative spaces and Manila became sort of a halfway house for newly grads before they are able to find a more stable trajectory for their practice and find a gallery to show their work.

Papaya wasn’t the only space. There was also a boom of independent spaces around that time. So there was a clear need from the community to have these kinds of spaces.

The concept of independence has changed with Green Papaya over the years. So I will articulate the kind of independence that we felt or that was present during our time. I was aware that when we opened up the space, it was a political action because it was declaring your independence from the state and being able to provide something to do and see that the state ignores. There is no arts and culture policy in the Philippines except for a funding institution, which is the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, where we apply for grants. But there is really no singular government policy that directs the development of arts in the Philippines. So I’m referring not just to us, but a lot of other initiatives during the period were doing this thing as a political act. Not necessarily to resist the government, but more to critique the government for negligence and the lack of infrastructure in arts and culture that could also serve the much younger constituencies. The idea of independence has always been discussed because as we went on through the years, we also realised that we were dependent on a lot of things or we were interdependent with other like-minded spaces. It’s been a phenomenon not only in Southeast Asia or in Asia, but also globally.

I’m actually triggered by your question because it’s also a question that I’ve been asking myself: what does independence actually mean and what are you actually independent from? It is too easy to say that things are independent because your resources are from somewhere else aside from art markets and institutions. Even if you say that it’s self-funded, where did you get this money from? You’re never really an island. Spaces always have operations and programming that require funding. So I guess, more importantly, the questions are: how much creative freedom do you actually have? Every grant has its own compromises, but how much freedom can you keep?

This is a lot more work than just ticking off what is on the checklist, getting the money, getting paid, and then living your life. Even operationally, I think it also applies because the whole field expects you to be competitors, right? You’re all artists, you’re all supposed to be climbing all these ladders. And then as Peewee mentioned a while ago, about interdependence — it also fuels these communal spaces. And although they are very, very small pockets of independence, we claim what we can because that’s all we really can have at the moment given the whole global situation.

This interdependency has a lot of emotional labour too. So that is the price of trying to go outside of the structures and categories. It’s a lot of extra labour. It sounds all great, of course, and you’re happy that you get together and work together, but the emotional labour is so huge in this attempt for independence.

I decided to close Green Papaya in 2017, so this was way before the pandemic, and this was way before we’re finding ourselves now as a collective. You can imagine Green Papaya having gone through stages with different people on board. Between me and Donna we took in maybe about five or six people who were able to work with us at one time or another, either as a curator or as a director. So the dynamics of a collective, we never experienced. When we announced that Green Papaya was closing in 2020, ironically two institutional foundations approached me after the speech to say, ‘Hey, we don’t want Green Papaya to close, what can we do?

But the decision to close was not entirely based on a lack of funding. Green Papaya, as with other independent spaces in Manila, was mostly founded by particular individuals. So these particular individuals provided the culture within these spaces. In 2017 we had to plan our exit because before we knew it, like-minded spaces, for example, Surrounded by Water, were closed. I told myself, I don’t want that. What I want is to have a plan and design a death or a funeral and make an event out of it. The pandemic happened and the fire happened. And then there was this big organisational thing that happened internally in Green Papaya. For the first time, I saw ourselves very disorganised. So things were falling apart. At that particular time right after the fire, I was not sure if Papaya could continue in 2020. But what gave me the strength and encouragement to continue was when my colleagues, who are twenty years younger than I am, decided to take control of the crisis. They responded to the crisis as a collective.

I just want to add that there is beauty in being able to dictate when you end, how you end, and how you’re going to continue. I think that’s also a claim of this independence, especially when spaces have a certain timeline that is dictated by all these external institutions and markets. To be able to put your foot down and say that we’re closing or we’re continuing – that’s something really beautiful.