Pio Abad
speaker
490 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 30 Jun
Pio Abad’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
No, so it's a continuing engagement.
You know, it's very much a huge part of my artistic practice.
I was thinking about this and actually the historical artists I turn to are often unnamed.
Often their authorship with the things they've made have been separated from them because the things they've made are considered natural history or anthropology.
I was at the Natural History Museum of American Art in New York two weeks ago and I'd spent a whole day exploring
immersed in these kind of incredibly woven textiles from the Bagobo people from Mindanao in the Philippines.
And I've known about this collection for a really long time.
They were brought to the US by a well-meaning American anthropologist in Singapore.
I think it was the late 1800s, early 1900s, under the guise of scholarship or... But I think what happens when well-meaning scholarship ends up with a whole textiles tradition being divorced from the community it's meant to serve.
And I think of those unnamed historical figures and...
who have devoted as much time to weaving, to beading, to creating, I don't know, the Benin bronzes.
You know, they're these unnamed craftsmen, unnamed artists who we'll never know.
I'd like to think that there's a way that I'm not exactly naming them, but actually paying tribute to them through my work.
Yeah, definitely.
I'd like to think that there is an element of solidarity, you know, in labour, in giving time to something that they're exiled, you know.
And often, like, when I request to view these objects in museums, it's always positively received because no one's asked for these things in a long time.
And actually, the simple process of viewing them actually becomes transformative for the object because they see the light of day, you know.
Yeah, it was a very basic title, you know.
And it's actually, it's from Mark Twain talking about the, they call it the annexation of the Philippines, which sounds like the Philippines is going to be some kind of basement with a swimming pool in Mayfair.
But talking about this endeavor of colonization, I love playing with words.
Showing 201–220 of 490 · page 11 of 25
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