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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That's not its peculiarity.
Many dictatorships have been under the auspices of American democracy.
But I think what the Marcoses were able to do, because they were and they still are really adept storytellers,
And so they were able to weave these quote unquote progressive elements, say, such as avant-garde architecture or performance art or even conceptualism.
They were able to weave these modes of kind of producing culture into their discourse of authoritarianism.
which on its own is quite a clever achievement.
I don't want to give that to them, but it is.
And one of the questions I've asked about my work, and I think what led to me making this kind of work, is how did that happen?
How did they get away with that?
But also, how can I recover these progressive elements, whether it's conceptualism or avant-garde discourse?
How do I take it away from them and reclaim it as something genuinely pro-human, pro-democracy, whatever that word means now?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's been a challenge because particularly the work with the Marcuses has kind of developed at a time when, you know, they were in the process of returning.
And so this desire to make art about it and this desire to make art that questions it.
You know, kept on colliding with their desire to return to power using their abilities to tell stories that convince people.
No, I mean, that's why I always struggle when people describe the work as timely, because it means the world's going to hell.
But no, that's true.
When I started thinking about the Marxists as a subject matter, it was actually a response to the Arab Spring, which had unfolded halfway through my time at the Royal Academy.
And as these decades-long dictatorships were falling, Gaddafi had ended.
Showing 41–60 of 490 · page 3 of 25
← Previous
Next →