The Cold War, Ecological Despoliation, and Socially Engaging Art: Roberto Villanueva’s Archetypes: Cordillera’s Labyrinth
Roberto Villanueva’s Archetypes: Cordillera’s Labyrinth
Midori Yamamura
Abstract
Mobilizing a large number of public for realization of his art, Filipino artist RobertoVillanueva (née Robert Gorospe, 1947-1995)received much attention before his untimely death of Leukemia in 1995. His strongly indigenized vocabulary of expression shed light on tribal knowledge on sustainability, which offered a postcolonial vantage point to his public, for them to reconsider the environmental depletion during the Cold War. His reputation quickly grew after his best-known work, Archetypes: Cordillera’s Labyrinth (1989). Erected on the grounds of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, an architecturally scaled 150-foot-wide spiral 2,000-feet long, composed of runo reeds, terminated in a round stone construct called a dap-ay, a sacred meeting spot for the northern Luzon mountain tribe of Ifugao province. The work was not only an assemblage of various tribal elements, but also built with the Ifugao people. Thinking about sustainability, the artist described Archetypesin 1992 as: “collaborating with nature” through “‘borrowing’ [materials] from the natural environment—earth, wind, fire, and other elements having organic cycles,” like tribal rites. In due time, his artworks would “vanish” by returning the materials back to the Earth, with communal rituals marking its beginning and ending. Using ecocritical art history, this paper will examine how nature was exploited during the Cold War and how Villanueva tried to restore it by his unique way of engaging public.