GINTONG PANAHON is the second chapter of Cuerda y corazón. A project by Felipe Talo, curated by Pilar Soler Montes, which explores his autobiography. 

For this exhibition he takes as his starting point the story told by his grandmother, La Manila, of her arrival from the Philippines to a small village in northern Spain.

‘A Filipino girl, barely 18 years old, is sitting in a small, uncomfortable armchair. Her aunts look at her with a certain astonishment. Shadows move across the window overlooking the street, and children jump up to see the newcomer.
The girl asks: - Why are they trying to see me through the window?
The aunts reply: - Oh, my child. The priest had told us that you Filipinos have a big, hairy tail where your back ends!’

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'The myths that speak of origins are always imbued with abundance and contradiction. In these tales, water often gushes from a sacred source, forming streams that penetrate the earth’s cracks, embarking on a journey that unveils the mysteries of creation. This symbolism is undoubtedly linked to the female body, where the wet principle of life is concealed in its orifices.

Water and earth unite in a disquieting harmony, manifesting itself where untamed nature emerges. Something similar to what must have happened at the festivals held at the arrival of spring, that recreated a primordial origin, predating historical time, where behaviors and identities were subverted and transformed into their opposites. Curiously, myths and archetypes often fulfill a psychic function tied to a specific territory. For instance, the women who lived on the banks of the Ilo Ilo River were said to have hairy bodies and long tails, feeding a narrative that associated hair with the wild and obscene. Hair has always been considered an indicator of animality, connecting humans to their deepest instincts. This revelation, both sacred and erotic, in its excess, induces a disorder that propels the being into a flight towards the unknown. Jung explained that archetypes are possibilities of representation, producing remote ways of seeing. Symbolic images, inherited under different morphologies and preserved in the depths of our memory, existing in a dimension of appearance and loss. This ebb and flow of memory is exemplified in the myth of the Amazons. Disappearing with the advent of Christianity, they reemerged during the time of the conquest, becoming identified with the nature of an uncontrollable territory. In this exhibition the Amazons, defiant figures reflecting chaotic entities, resurface joyfully alongside “cagonas,” “meonas,” “lloronas,” and hermaphrodites. They dance and sing an old song once heard on the banks of the Ilo Ilo River: Naiihi ako at naiihi sa layo mo.'

Exhibition text by Pilar Soler Montes (writer and curator, Madrid) 

FELIPE TALO - ‘Gintong Panahon’ 

curated by Pilar Soler Montes 

opens Saturday June 8, 5-8pm 

at Wouters Gallery