The dogs return
Jel Suarez
My regular sleeping pattern went off-course two weeks after the lockdown began. I sometimes wake in cold sweats with vivid impressions of horrible dreams.
During an afternoon nap, I had a vision of myself watching the sun set from a corner street as I slow danced to Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” It was a pleasant reverie until the tune turned into an endless loop that paralyzed my entire body. As night fell the music grew faint until I was unnerved by silence.
The silhouette of a dog seemed to bare itself suddenly under streetlight. My muscles froze. Breathing heavily, I struggled to step back. I remember screaming as it walked or crawled or crept towards me — perhaps to attack, or maybe to warn of an impending menace. The dog’s eyes were illumined by a flicker of light, and its howls turned into a distressing siren.
Did it howl to make contact? To announce its presence? To alert the neighborhood? Was it, like me, responding to threat?
I woke up terrified of another false awakening. Sometimes my dreams feel like actual memories; waking is as difficult as separating them from reality. I realized that the sound ringing in my head was the sound of sirens blaring outside; the barangay was signaling the beginning of curfew. Days after, music would play through the PA system before the alarm, perhaps to temper the shared anxiety growing in this neighborhood. I figured that must have been the song playing in my nightmare.
Before this madness, I had the chance to visit Gym Lumbera’s work in Variations of the Field, a curatorial project by Christian Tablazon at the Vargas Museum. This was in late February, weeks before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. It was my first encounter with the dog.
In lucid dreams, one can gain the ability to change events and outcomes. Dreaming of the dog while alarms for curfew rang out must have been my body’s way of alerting my senses. I thought of Lumbera’s work upon waking, and how it was an ominous prelude to this struggle.
In his mixed-media installation The Black Dog Which Causes Cholera, Lumbera staged a library or archive room, which appeared like a set in a low-budget suspense movie. Drawing from his background as a filmmaker, he wove photographic media, setting, and objects to design a space that echoes the voices within archives.
When I entered the room, my attention was caught by a streak of light flashing in rhythm with what sounded like a manually operated apparatus. From the entrance, it looked as if a portal had been left open, luring the audience in for a closer look.
According to Lumbera, the work alludes to the hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who died from cholera during the Philippine Insurrection against the US. Born and raised in Batangas, a province also ravaged by cholera, Lumbera was interested in how the disease affected revolutionary efforts in his hometown. By detaining Filipinos in concentration camps and enforcing quarantine policies, the Americans used the outbreak to reinforce their occupation.
Entangling myth, history, and the supernatural, the work reexamines the shape-shifting asuang of Philippine folklore through a series of black dogs projected on a blank page of a rotting history book, displayed in an acrylic box, theatrically lit by the slide projector. It was like a forgotten remnant of our lost years made see-through.
Lumbera sifted through historical archives and made references to zoologist and public official Dean Worcester’s The Philippines: Past and Present, collecting images of dogs captured in photographs by Worcester and other American photographers who had settled in the archipelago during this period.
The tiny images of dogs appeared as phantasmic figures, shifting and resurfacing. They bid viewers to cautiously revisit the asuangs, that continuously haunt us, the asuangs that linger in our minds.
Collecting, conjuring, and laying cut images back on books transcend space and time. By manipulating these archives, Lumbera retells the terrors that may plague us again if we don’t look through the traumas of past generations.
The work is an ongoing project Lumbera intends to publish as a photobook of “black dogs” photographed in the streets together with those gathered from the Worcester archives. The project already comprises 2,000 photographs since it began in November 2019.
Dreams of animals reveal so much about our instincts and how we protect ourselves in fight-or-flight situations. It is the nature of our consciousness: resonating inner conflicts, personal myths, and responses when faced with the uncertain. I’ve always thought of them as synchronic energies revealing the interconnectedness of the mind and body to the natural world, a wellspring for divination.
In the stillness of the nights to come, we will hear more howling and wailing. The dogs have returned — perhaps briefly, perhaps longer. They reveal our inferiority to nature, and the fragile systems man has built to claim power. They have opened a portal from which we can choose to become vessels for hope and new wisdom. As the dogs re-emerge in the crisis of the pandemic, the rule of nature, its power to instigate catastrophe is recapitulated. We are reminded that hauntings are universal and timeless. They enter our lives as sounds, energies, or recurring apparitions. They come as visions, as specters of dogs, shape-shifting and drawing blood.
Lumbera’s work is also a divination, an understanding of our current state, rather than a prediction of what is to happen. It does not assert a definite fate but prompts us to recognize what we can use to resist circumstance. It invites us to look at the holes in our existence as gateways from which we can create new possibilities for the world.
Jel Suarez (b. 1990) is a self-taught artist born and based in Manila. Her practice is anchored on collage as an act of excavation, beginning with a hunt for materials ripe with narrative (books, catalogues, and archives). She gathers fragments of their histories as a form of creative inquiry. In mining these collections and cutting parts of wholes, she considers chipping away time and releasing artefacts from older lives.
