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
And ultimately, I think what I do...
I'm in a studio.
I'm making drawings.
And there's a power in that.
But I think understanding that what I do is I make art.
It's not activism in the way that I've also lived through, you know, an activist's life.
No, I think that's true.
I think the question of how to speak politically with an artistic voice is always, I guess, at the heart of what I'm trying to get to.
I think when I was growing up in the late 80s to early 90s, Philippines was this hotbed of activism, of coup d'etat, of art kind of finding this social function.
But often the guise of that art is through agitprop.
It was through social realist painting.
And I never found an affinity to that visual language.
And so in some ways, what I've been trying to do with my work is to kind of reverse engineer things in a way of trying to cultivate a different language that still talks about the things that I'm drawn to, whether it's beauty or drawing or even, you know, the exquisite nature of museum display.
But to try and work out really if there are ways that these things that we experience day to day that we actually enjoy work.
Whether these things can be vehicles for the harder conversations that often appear to us as a bit shouty or angry.
Or sometimes to some people that volume becomes a reason to disengage.
Whereas I think I've always been very clear that my role as an artist is to find ways of engagement.
And I think the visual language has developed from that desire.
So tell us about that.
I think that's kind of the peculiarity of the Marcos dictatorship because it was obviously under the auspices of American democracy.
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