Marco Ortiga makes waves with old boats
If you close your eyes and listen past the cocktail chatter at Vinyl on Vinyl, you might pick up the circular creaking of boats or the rhythmic splash of waves in a Capiz harbor.
That’s built into Marco Ortiga’s latest exhibit, “Baroto,” now at the Chino Roces art space until Dec. 3, in which Ortiga has fashioned an elaborate field of “kinetic art,” this time incorporating boards from worn-out pump boats into an arresting scene: you watch the slabs of wood, decorated with their original fading paint, rotating in their own asymmetric, non-synchronous patterns around the ground floor viewing space. Another piece features a slowly undulating round plastic container full of ball bearings; their rolling movement back and forth suggests the distant crash of waves, if you have the right kind of ears.
Ortiga, the son of Crucible Gallery owner Sari Ortiga, often incorporates recycled materials and nature into his pieces—kinetic wind chimes, and even a similar boat installation in Pangasinan—but here he was led to Capiz to join his brother-in-law Marvin Montefrio, who was doing environmental fieldwork there, charting the impact of climate change on the community's livelihood and food security.
“I met a boat maker there, and I told him my intention,” says Marco. “He knew where to look for discarded boats. Their relationship with boats in Capiz is kind of different—they replace them after one to two years; they get broken, they don't bother fixing it.” The elements and hard daily use eat away at the boats, but those discarded hulls have multiple uses: they either get worked into people’s homes, used as drying beds for fish, or become firewood for cooking.
Marco had another idea. He wanted his pieces to extend the life of a boat, while also commenting on nature and how lives are built around this constant cycle of labor, use, reuse.
He began in Basiao, Ivisan, working with local boatmaker Harley Bulanon who helped him find seven discarded barotos to dismantle, pack and transport back to Manila. “That was my only condition,” says Marco. “It had to be non-usable, so it has no value to them, then I paid for it.”
The idea of seemingly random motion has often guided Ortiga’s work, like the weight-driven Spirograph-like machines he installed at Artablado last year in the group exhibit “The Sound of Abstract.” Somatosonic, his sound-experiment band with director Tad Ermitaño as co-member, played at the Artablado launch, and will also gig here, joining with the soft churning of the wooden slats in the background.
Marco wanted to reflect on the fishermen’s lives, so the pieces are left intact from the boats. “This is the actual condition of the boats. I didn't touch the paint, I just stuck it on the wood and covered it with a resin.”
The exhibit’s found-art quality comes from this, following on his earlier “Inalon” show, emerging from an Anakbanwa Art Residency in Dagupan. An architecture major, Ortiga says he doesn’t really “choose” the materials that end up driving his pieces: “Baroto” arose through an “opportunity,” a chance a visit to a place where humans have been battling the elements since first taking to water on buoyant slabs of wood. In Ortiga’s exhibit, those boats beat on against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, but also moving forward.
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