It’s best to probably keep them separate, at least in the beginning, for these are parallel practices that seemingly do not get knotted at one point or at the end of some loose rumination over their works. Yet they both ply on routes of uncertainty—that median of visibility and mere presence—of the quotidian and the sublime.

Ah-hud

Gaston’s Ah-hud is a tactile onomatopoeia of breathing, of air—the huffing and puffing, the heaving, the wailing, the sighing—as the exhalation of fatigued limbs in response to, or from, the exertion of a heavily capacitated labor signaling the pulse of a body still possessed of motion, or as specifically indexed by the carved form of a totem of a culture centered on the cultivation and consumption of rice: hence, the pestle as the throbbing monolith of collective bodies in unisonant labor for a communal feasting.

The pestle was whittled from the whole trunks of two mango trees and segmented into ten parts, leaving mere inches of space in between. Seemingly resonating in those spaces is the rhythm of such heaving, as air and mass, as space and object, as wave and ebb.

Traditionally, the wooden pestle is used to pound rice, or rather, to separate the husk from harvested rice grains as part of the preparation for cooking. The process is thrice done, alternating the pounding with the winnowing until all the husk has been completely removed. The term for husked rice, ambayu, is derived from the action of pounding—binayu, bayu, or pagbabayu. Bayu is also used as a euphemism for the sex act or the thrusting motion of the male. Anything, it seems, that is thrust through a hole or onto a concavely-shaped object has to be elongated: as the shape of the pestle, with the mortar being a naturally compliant form, cupping the end of the pestle at each pounding. Likewise, the sticks and bamboo poles used by Ifugao men to poke the earth before they are implanted by the womenfolk with seeds and saplings are phallically structured. The very act of tilling the soil with such implements is a metaphor in itself to sustenance and (earthly / ritual) communion.

This is more so evoked in his work installed in the garden of the Jorge Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines, Diliman a week before Ah-hud was set-up at MO_Space. The piece entitled Envie de faire l’amour (The Envy of Making Love) has several wooden pestles strung through iron rods, which are driven through the garden soil in the probable manner by which Ifugao men had driven dibble sticks in preparation for planting rice. It may not be surprising—or it just becomes a form of natural adaptation—for a culture focused on meting out its nutritional survival to evolve a language centered on such. This, as well as chants, have become a constant part of conversation just as much as breathing is in between those utterances: i.e. epic chants such as the Hudhud keep the pace of movement while working the fields, and how customs are passed on almost exclusively by oral tradition.

Gaston’s video shows him thrusting the wooden pestle into air, the breathiness of the effort put into it amplified, as though pumping air out of air and into air again just underscores the impossibility of language without air—the space that rounds out each word and utterance, of our bite and swallow and comprehension of it.

But by the totemical index of the pestle, he has brought to the fore language’s ‘carnal structure,’ as well as its dietetic origins, more than its usual socio-cosmological construct, as necessitating a vessel, a corpus through which all utterances may resonate with meaning.