Then and Now And Everything After: The Foreign and the Forgotten in Norberto Roldan’s The Past is Another Country‍

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Roldan’s reading appears to guide his process: objects are collected, aged, and then misused in a minor transgression, alluding to the decisions to ignore and to alter the past. The full length of two commercial carpets from the Middle East, each one 7 feet long, is bound like a tapestry to the wall, evocative of the sanctity ascribed to souvenirs purchased by those returning from the Arab States. The train of a priest’s vestments, meant to sweep across the church floor, is draped instead like a curtain with the word “invicta” hanging in its wake. The volumes echoed in this display are matched by the memory and inviolability etched into the materials Roldan chooses, with the drip of wax connoting the passing of time while taming the embroidered and tufted surfaces.

The modernism of which Toshio writes refers to the violent processes built on militarization and manufacture, as well as the conflicts between good intentions and global designs that have repeatedly figured into Roldan’s work. A former seminarian, Norberto Roldan completed a BA in Philosophy from St. Pius X Seminary in Roxas City before garnering credentials as an artist, first with a BFA in Visual Communications from University of Santo Tomas, Manila followed by a MA in Art Studies at University of the Philippines in Diliman. Given the artist’s education, one can track a course from the spiritual to the cerebral; however, it is also too easy to assume a binary opposition between such concerns. The challenge proposed here is one of seeing the spiritual and cerebral within the same frame, wherein they bear the same weight, occupy the same space, and draw from the same source.

“I have been moved to tears by the work of Norberto Roldan,” Toshio continues, speaking of work that possessed a “great spiritual intensity and expressed the pain of the heart.” That Toshio does not mention the conceptual in Roldan’s practice is revealing of a common approach to these assemblages. By bringing up a part of the body that appeals not to logic, but to our sentiments, Toshio draws attention to Roldan’s continuing choice to use surfaces that are pliant and yielding to sheath these beasts of hardwood, many of which were salvaged from dismantled homes. The look of these pieces—their patina, the recourse to fiction through the decontextualized objects they bring together—has been compared to the work of Joseph Cornell, but the differences with the postcolonial narratives Roldan summons.

There is a heartbeat pulsing through the work. It is there in the fragments of personal histories and tatters of memory–in the weight of the actual age and antiquity of the objects Roldan borrows. With each piece, Roldan sets the stage for re-imagining how history comes together through stories big and small. And through this recourse to nostalgia, to a connective thread that ties one to the elements that commonly invoke the haze of the bygone, we return to the heart to describe this encounter with Roldan’s work: work that, in any other context, might be mistaken for the clutter of humble households. This is work that speaks of the conflicted histories of the colonized as well as the deeply personal memories of having dwelt, having lived, and the pain and pleasure fixed into these stories.

Through these works, Roldan proclaims that the past may not have even passed, as we bear witness to a theater of contradictions unfolding behind glass, invoking the foreign and forgotten. Another country indeed: neither here, nor there. Citing Raslan again, to remember a past may actually be closer to the act of framing and re-arranging, than it is to retrieval and assembly. In an attempt to put the pieces of the past together, these works seem to say, all we are really left with are pieces

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