Bembol dela Cruz’s and Ranelle Dial’s somber works of ill-fated citadels and flying war machines reflect on the imperfections of technology and ideology in consideration of the possibility of a history that is rewritten if such conditions failed completely, there by producing a valence effect of universal outcomes, of a modernity without horrific ends.

The strength of an idea in relation to its cultural meaning is measured by the durability of its monuments. Public monuments and architecture, then, are the interface to social ideology, its significance found in representations of power. Though nothing lasts forever—as dynasties crumble and charismatic dictators fall out of grace, a social idea survives more than the substance it rests on. Ideas are transmitted and multiplied accordingly, while architectural monuments remain static and locally confined. Once their political moment has passed, these monuments crumble in tandem with time, impotent and silent, a glaring reminder of man’s foolish desire to transcend nature.

Ruins therefore reflect the gravity of an ideological initiative’s disintegration from mass consciousness, falling from the height of its purported ideals only to be abandoned, moldering in disregard. The chaos and danger of its conceptual demise echo the evacuation of truth and the unreason coiled within a mind distant from its realities. This distant mind creates fortresses and prisons that buffer the fragile psyche from the forces of truth. Yet there is comfort amongst the embrace of lies: caverns, labyrinths, and chambers become metaphors for the intricate spaces of the mind that trap reason into a prison where data turns into a maze of cryptic codes, with filing systems as endless modules so interchangeable as to become formless nonsense, easily creating its own asylum. Dial’s prisons are inhabited by guilt that haunts the social terrain.

Whereas dela Cruz pictures terrifying metallic birds of prey that soar high above the skies into exquisite visions of death. They are the epitome of high industry: the products of advanced design and technology and the ultimate weapon. These war machines are manifestations of murderous desire, created for maximum damage and destruction. And yet they never lived up to their advanced potential, for during the time of actual combat encounters flawed invention and unsuccessful fighting tactics carried these warplanes towards their own destruction and eventual obsolescence.

Despite the awe-inspiring fear that they bring, there is also an element of nostalgia, of melancholy and loss which both works indulge. Specifically in the manner that these examples are taken from the Second World War, as if revisiting that time when things appeared to be clear-cut, black-and-white, photo realistic; where morality appeared to have two sides—good and evil, clearly indicating who the enemy is. History gives us the comfort of distance; we are able to look at atrocities from a critical standpoint, objectively studying the impact of events whilst postulating probabilities in order to make alternate histories.

In both instances, these war machines and architectural remains are manifestations of an ideology’s greatest objectives at the time, which by now we consider utterly obsolete and ineffectual, total failures by themselves. Such that if all of these ideological representatives were absolute failures, if all of them didn’t work at all, then a total rewriting of history could be made possible. This would alter the present and would create a mutation towards a new future. A valence effect then happens over the belief that hopeful things would continue to occur regardless of all the terror and tragedy involved during the war. This philosophical probability would mean that evil may be a necessity, as a reminder of the ethical boundaries that permeate life. In light of it, the march of modernity’s utopian progress that had culminated in the Second World War has trampled into our daily lives in the form of global capitalism, which today has become a necessary evil.

Thus, from Dial’s and dela Cruz’ works, we begin to reflect on the legacy of Modernism: the desire for an essential, universal being—homogenized, cleansed, monumental, utopian, autonomous, absolute—a centralized consciousness for the new, the pure, the progressive. Overwhelming and vast, Modernism’s ideological reach was worldwide in scope; totalitarian empires built easily on its foundations and yet once tried in the social reality at the margins, it was found to be unstable and predisposed to corruption. Modernism’s effect upon its cultural outposts has become a mutation of sorts, producing bastard offspring from the impure failure of the original. The stench of death, therefore, pervades these works: death in its purifying essence, death in the obsolescence of conventions, death as a form of creative ritual—searching introspectively within its discipline to reinvent itself—and death as a sublime condition of the eternal, always returning, always beginning, always present, always new.

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