Carlos Quijon, Jr.: I am interested in how we can think about conceptualism in Southeast Asia, and I want to consider this question in a more exploratory tenor: What is different, if there is a difference, in the development of conceptualism in Southeast Asia? How is its development different from that of Western conceptualism? Do we even need to differentiate the two, or is it more productive to consider conceptualism as an encompassing global narrative—like how it was approached by the seminal exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (Queens Museum, 1999)?

David Teh describes your practice and your artistic ethos as follows: “[Phinthong is] a conceptual alchemist, specializing in the conversion of disparate values across apparently unrelated economies.”¹ Teh uses this distinction as a foil or counterpoint in his discussion of how your idea of dematerialization, a concept crucial in Western conceptualism, is very different from our usual take on dematerialization. 

So maybe we can start with that. If you can speak on this idea of conceptual alchemy—what do you think about it? Does it resonate with how you conceptualize your practice?

Pratchaya Phinthong: I am not sure if I have an issue with or am concerned so much about conceptualism or a conceptual approach. I mean, definitely what I have been doing somehow falls into these categories, and I have nothing against that. However, I have not been actively trying to resist these categories. From my point of view, I am interested in understanding other stuff. I am reading around. By reading, I understand the terms of the conversations and, of course, this somehow frames every production of art or the way that I practice it. 

When it comes to the works I make—somehow I do not produce them, somehow I let things produce, somehow I am more interested in trying to question my approaches to thinking than in whether I am being a conceptualist or not. In my practice, I would have people participate in my kind of ideas and thinking. Of course people think, and that does not mean that people have to be born into this kind of conceptual logic. 

CQJr: I also feel like there’s a need to keep this tension; of course people will, if they see your work and if they read about your work, categorize. Especially for art historians, there would be an almost automatic categorization. “Oh, this guy works with labor and materials and language; therefore, he is a conceptualist.” 

Most of the artists from Southeast Asia who are doing a lot of things, not just painting, not just the academic traditions of art-making, but also a lot of other things—they don’t really categorize their work as anything actually. That’s one part of the equation, and then the other part is the work’s legibility or how people react to and read and categorize your practice: “If you’re looking for an artist in Southeast Asia with a conceptualist practice, check the works of Pratchaya.”

If we don’t go with or if we somehow suspend the idea of conceptualism or a conceptualist practice, how do you describe your interests in your work? I know that you work a lot with artisans, laborers, and specialists, and I know that your artistic methods are mostly guided by things or materials that you find. How do you characterize what you do in terms of your interests? What are the usual things that you think about before diving into a work? 

PP: I am interested in the definition of things generally and for art. Why do we need art? Why should it be here for a long time? And then why should I have been born for this, and then why continue doing it? When is it going to end? If it’s not my life, then when will my art life end, and will I be going to other fields, doing other things?

I think if I came from outer space, I would choose to be an artist because artists aren’t responsible for things. We don’t have so much responsibility. We are not nurses, and we are not doctors; we are not architects. They will not come after me when the building collapses. 

So what is really being an artist about? That’s what I am so interested in. A part of what defines what I would call an artist is the work that they do, the production of an artwork. What it means, what the value of it is, how it exists, why it is exchanged—why its value increases or decreases, and if there are ways around this.

It’s a thin membrane that you can really slip in and out of without people understanding it. This really gets you a little numb, and maybe the next time you slip in and out, you will get used to it. People will not be affected because you didn’t respond to something—unless you are in the front lines of art and activism or you really hurt somebody or rip somebody off and you call that part of your practice, or something like that.

So I wonder why I am here. Life is really short, and if I leave for a long time tomorrow, no one is going to care about this, and then next week, I can just come back and be an artist again. No one would really care about this. I mean performing being an artist is also for one’s own sake.

When I started to call myself an artist, you had to have long hair, and you had to act kind of cool, and then you had to have all sorts of things. After all the years of studying, I tried to trash these ideas. When I was in Germany, the classes were really nice. Professors were trying to trash me and force me to forget about what I have. So I started up a new thing. Something that I was not really good at, and then I was trying to be good at things so many times that at some point, I felt that this is the burden of the artist, that this is something that one has to carry on. This is how you get your name as an artist, right? So, I think the problem for me is creating something that I am interested in. It is not just that I want to be good at things.

CQJr: I am interested in what you said about the idea that you can easily slip in and out of the art world—and your art practice, too, in a sense. I am thinking about this in relation to more traditional mediums, for example, painting or sculpture, and how these are very anchored in tradition. These are anchored in producing as many things as you can so that you can become an expert in them. I am wondering if this idea of slipping in and out of your practice plays a part in why you have created the things that you’ve created, the kinds of forms that you work with, or the kinds of concerns that you have—found objects, collaborative processes, invisible histories?

PP: I would describe this as trying to change the approach to the same thing—in different moments and at different times—to understand the different dimensions of it and the meaning that will come out of each approach.

For example, we all shower in the morning—maybe I just did, right? But we do not recognize how we do it. So when you go back to thinking about that . . . you did it without a plan, right? You don’t realize how you started, with touching what, and then trying to do what, and then that you’ve done this thing so many times that it has become a structure—it can be solved and quite automatic. It depends. But once you become aware of that, it changes. So it has become a little bit unnatural. So if you think, “I am realizing right now that I reach for the soap,”—I mean, for example, you have normal soap and you have liquid soap—so you shower differently. I think that’s beautiful.

CQJr: I mean, that’s so interesting—also, because if you remember, we opened our conversation with how David Teh discusses your work in relation to value and in relation to converting value from different types of economies and also the idea of dematerialization. Hearing you talk about your practice—and while you were talking, actually, I had a breakthrough, that maybe what describes your practice best is not really dematerialization but rather an act of denaturalization. We have these kinds of naturalized ideas about what art should be—your example about showering, using bar soap or liquid soap—and that kind of experience. I feel like it is a different way of processing what art-making is. We know these things; we are used to them. 

I want to ground these kinds of realizations in your actual works. If you think about your practice in relation to conventional ideas of conceptualism—or even the tradition of conceptualism and how your practice might move away from this kind of tradition—maybe we can discuss Spoon [disk] (2024) (fig. 2), an amorphous, flattened blob or puddle of solidified metal crafted from unexploded ordnances, unexploded mines that people in the northern part of Laos harvest from their fields and out of which they create trinkets that they sell to tourists.

I wonder how you approached the development of this work. From the outside, for example, for me, looking at this work, there are gestures that you can read as conceptual: There is an object that exists, and you create something out of it; and there is material labor as much as there is conceptual labor involved. But how do you describe the work? How did you start thinking about what it is, and what was your process in relation to creating the work?

And this is more of a personal interest: What came first? Did you know that they were producing stuff from unexploded bombs? Did you know that before, or did you see the object first and then talk to them about what they were doing?

PP: I didn’t know that at first. My artist friends, who are a couple, went to shoot their work in northern Laos, in Napia village. They were passing through the mountains somewhere in Laos, where they went to a noodle place where they served pho. I think it was a Lao-Vietnamese version, and the spoon was really light. That is how they recognized that the material for the spoons was different. It was not common, and then they told me about it. I visited the village with them, and we found out that there are at least 17 houses in the village doing the same thing: They had shophouses where they melted the ordnances and then cast them (fig. 3). This happened under their houses, and they used the same heat to warm their homes. 

This is how I start my work. I mean many stories come from another story. At that time, I was also trying to respond to the idea of soft power for an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).² I was trying to see how I can respond to this, and for me, the best way was to throw myself into the situation. And so I went back to Napia, and I chose one house owned by this really young couple who had just had a baby. I think that now he is already grown up. So I just asked them if they were interested in doing something with me. They said yes, and then I asked them if they could cast the metal in molds and then just make a hundred of them.

The next day, we came back, and they had one finished. We kind of liked it, and it started like that. I did not know what to do with it. I just had some idea to make it like a mirror, to make it into something that can reflect. I brought it back and gave it to my friend, who always made things with me. I challenged him to make a mirror out of it. So he had to find a way to slice it and then sand it. This became a recipe. 

All that I am saying is that my process includes a lot of reaching out to other people, to other people’s places and other people’s ideas, and then trying to see if we can do something together. And then the word that we were talking about earlier, “labor,” is in the word “collaboration”—in the middle of it. So, I mean, without these, you cannot be associated with other people; labor always appears, not just in the workforce but also in other forces. To be able to collaborate, whether through your body or your sweat . . . these are my materials. Convincing is also my material. 

So, basically, I am good at shifting and turning things. And probably that currency that David Teh said about alchemy in my practice is coming from this kind of method. It is sort of an exchanging thing, but also different. I mean, it’s crazier than that because in between the nodes, I try to make a cycle of it.

CQJr: And in our previous conversation, you mentioned that you also wanted to make use of the work’s exhibition as part of its performance and, I guess, to allude to the circulation of the objects made out of the unexploded ordnances. Can you tell us more about that? 

PP: Yeah, I mean you saw Spoon [disk] as part of the SFMOMA collection. I never wanted to exhibit in that space, and so I asked them if I could exhibit in the art shop, in the museum shop. I wanted to sell my work and to give the proceeds back to this village.

So I created this box. Inside the box, you see this metal object really shining like mercury, reflecting like a mirror. In the first run, I sold probably 50 pieces, and it was shown in the museum shop and not in the exhibition space. It included a postcard that I dedicated to the curator of SFMOMA because I had sent her the original card (figs. 4, 5).

The city down the mountain has a shophouse where there is a nongovernmental organization (NGO) called Mines Advisory Group (MAG). MAG helps with locating and collecting unexploded mines and exploding them as safely as they can. They hire young women and men and train them. It is mostly the women who go into the open field first, and then when the bomb locator goes off, they mark it, and then the men come in to figure out how to dig up the bomb because it is buried. 

Laos was heavily bombed during World War II. For Thai people, Laos was an ideal place for agriculture. They had hectares of green land, but they cannot do agricultural activities because the bombs are still there (fig. 6). Every time they attempt to cross or cultivate the forest, they get hurt. So they have to have some people help, like from this NGO, but there are only a few, and MAG is one of them. They have a shophouse where they display the trinkets I mentioned earlier. They also earn money from photo postcards, which they also sell in the shophouse. The postcards were the work of one photographer. I do not remember the name on the back, but they sell them for one dollar. 

I got the idea immediately after I saw this, and that was when I made a postcard. I just sent the blank postcard with the name of a curator and the address of SFMOMA, and I sent it from Laos. So the museum exhibited it along with the one that you saw.

The photo on the postcard is a picture of an old lady. She just had her land cleared of bombs, and in the photo, she is holding her first cotton harvest. She planted cotton years ago, and this is her first crop. It is in her hand. It is a piece of pure cotton so light that it flies when you release it from your hand. Then you remember that the bomb was something that fell from the sky. I liked the idea of juxtaposing the two in the box (fig. 7). In the box, you will find something really solid, something that you have to get rid of—the bombs—and then another thing that is really light, that will be leaving you immediately. So it is softness and strength. Something that kills and something that looks hopeful.

CQJr: This attentiveness to form and how forms circulate is very important in your practice. I think for the most part, this is how your works become legible as conceptualist and how they compellingly play out conceptualist gestures. How important is this attentiveness to your practice? How does this attentiveness inflect your interest in value and material and symbolic economies?

PP: I mean, it does not matter what form it is—it could be a painting, it could be whatever; but I found these, and then I designed the paper box with some people I know here, and then we created them by hand, like any merchandise.

The disk in SFMOMA is the raw material for other works in this series. Thinking about that raw material and how sanding it eventually creates this mirror—and that takes a lot of months. And my friend found a technique to transpose the materials from one form to another. When I had the exhibition in my gallery gb agency [in Paris], I was already thinking about other forms that these can take on (figs. 8, 9). I tried to see the bigger picture of the project and how it could extend.

I went to a website about phantom limbs. So a lot of people lost their limbs during World War II. What comes along with this is the phantom limb syndrome, when the missing limb still exists in your brain. I discovered this guy who created this thing called “mirror therapies.” His name is Stephen Sumner, and he runs this organization called Me and My Mirror.

I wanted to connect with him, but this was during COVID. So it was complicated to get connected, and I tried to see if he wanted to collaborate somehow. But what I wanted from him is basically nothing. I just admired the way he did things because he lost his leg in a roadside accident, and then he went to this therapy. So he got over phantom limb, and then he wanted to share the way he did it with other people. He flew to conflict areas like Afghanistan or other war-torn places, and then he went to Cambodia and he just bicycled around the country, finding people who are amputees and trying to help them by giving away this kind of a plate, just a kind of mirror that is light and easy to carry.

We cast the unexploded bombs into these plates and made the mirrors. We exhibited them with the goal that when I sold one, I would share the money with him so that he could go to other conflict areas—because on his website he asks for donations because he is doing it by himself.

This is the legacy of war. The village and other villages like it have been behind, starting with previous generations. They just cannot move on economically. In my practice, I think about how questions of economy can go through this kind of transformation.

This transformation is part of the work—from the raw materials to the objects in the box—and then it becomes an installation nicely representing phantom limbs. All the ideas are brought back as resources for the person who is going to solve the problem on the spot, who wants to stop the pain of people. So when you see this kind of man going like the dot that I have been trying to connect to other dots. Then I think, “This is the reason that I’m here, to connect this dot to others and make things possible.” It is not even about what you call me; you can call me another NGO. I am an artist doing such things. You can call me an activist or whatever you want. In the end, I just do what I am doing, and I think that this is the bigger picture. All of this is somehow giving me back some energy, so I think that this is why I am still coping and doing this. 

Typically thinking about the bigger picture looks like wanting to have bigger frames or using lots of colors or using a bigger canvas. For me, I have these bombs that I can have whenever I want because there are a lot of them to clear out in Laos. How are we going to get rid of these so that people can cultivate their lands? That is how material has been somehow found.

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In a symposium on the history of performing arts in Southeast Asia held in Kuala Lumpur in 1997, art historian T. K. Sabapathy advocated for the embracing of “lateral methods” in art historical analyses in order to “deepen the grain of readings and interpretations.”¹ Elsewhere, literary scholar José Esteban Muñoz, elaborating the prospect of a “queer utopian hermeneutics,” wrote that “queerness’s ecstatic and horizontal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world.”² These lines of inquiry are made to intersect in this essay and taken as provocations for a possible method of looking at an art history of queerness and, in a more expansive imagination, a queer methodology for an art history of region.

How would an art history venture into vistas of queerness without relying on the normativity of imagining a unilinear lineage of “queer art” or “queer artists,” but also without disavowing an interested, queer agency? Vital to this essay’s proposition is an errancy or, in art historian Patrick D. Flores’s conceptualization of the region, an excitation: a way of rendering vulnerable the canonical,³ or of “animating detritus to life force.”⁴ Both “queer art history” and art history of region are allowed to play out as latitude over lineage, or animated trajectories in favor of genealogies. This way, the work of the art historical becomes tropological, which for the literary critic Srinivas Aravamudan involves an “attitudinal shift” that seizes “the hope of some advantage [of] a renewed critical purchase on . . . texts and their historical contexts.”⁵

This queer method foregrounds a “potentiality [that] is always in the horizon and . . . never completely disappears but, instead, lingers and serves as a conduit for knowing and feeling other people.”⁶ It discerns a sociality that is formative and prone to errancy—in the sense that its constituency and its valency are not schematized—but is nonetheless ardent in its anticipations of a compelled public. I deem this sociality auspicious because it promises a future conviviality, one that plays out interventive conceptualizations of social formations and the political. It is the tropological activity that carries out this auspiciousness and makes this sociality willed by plural agencies and not mere abstraction. It is in this way that I imagine queerness: an orientation toward a horizon where sociality is errant and excited, opportune and always auspicious.

Since this queer method is an orientation, it is actively positioned. Echoing Sabapathy in his remarks about regionalist endeavors, such an orientation needs “positions of advantage.”⁷ Reckoning this pluripotent, because not predetermined, sociality is queer in as much as it unsettles normative articulations of who determines, participates in, and constitutes it. Orienting the effort to write art history in this way, then, is an agentive activity not just for the art historian, the artists, and the works of art, but also for the publics and the discursive infrastructure that they constitute in this labor. In this essay, such a reckoning is identified in the practices of David Medalla (1938-2020), Nick Deocampo (born 1959), and Yason Banal (born 1972).

This auspiciousness finds exemplary articulation in David Medalla’s A Stitch in Time (1967– ), a participatory, ongoing work that invites people to embroider or sew an object onto a length of cloth using thread that hangs above it in spools. The work takes inspiration from a serendipitous meeting between Medalla and “a handsome young man who carried a backpack to which a column of cloth was attached, like a long pillow.”⁸ Sewn to this column of cloth were knickknacks that, accumulated from the young man’s travels, included a handkerchief that Medalla had gifted to one of his lovers in 1967 and that bore the artist’s name and a message he had written to them.

I start with Medalla in order to craft an art history of queerness that eludes a self-fulfilling and unilinear unravelling. Whereas typical accounts of lineage or genealogy tend to discern practices as palpably continuous, a lateral or latitudinal approach foregrounds tractions and trajectories. The momentum of A Stitch in Time is driven by a thriving traffic of individuals, objects, affects, desires. Art historian Eva Bentcheva argues that the work “function[s] not only as an abstract ‘relational’ gesture, but also as a discursive site of political and critical production.”⁹ Just the same, this relationality is never abstract in Medalla’s work: fabric transforms into a matrix of agencies and affects of prolific potential activated by the participants’ encounter with the work. This is an inchoateness that rethinks the artistic object’s autonomy and suspends the usual binaries ascribed to public and private spaces. As Medalla explained in 2013: “The thing I like best about this work is that whenever anyone is involved in the act of stitching, he or she is inside his or her own private space, even though the act of stitching might occur in a public place.”¹⁰

This prolific potential also plays out feminist and trans prospects. Artist Sonia Boyce, for example, intimates a feminist possibility in the continuity between “women’s work” and Medalla’s artwork that is marked by “a single material gesture, where the embroidered handkerchief stands in for the symbolic connective tissue of a sprawling network across space and time, and an uncanny loop of intimacy and estrangement . . . an expression of tenderness and care . . . passed between transitory figures.”¹¹ Theorist Jaya Jacobo, in a conversation with Flores, identifies a prefiguration of a “trans potential” in the work’s “relay of women-gay-queer” that is intensified by its “transmasculine” redeployment of “feminist impulses”: “The normative and recuperated valence of the craft of woman is released, not colonized, by a gay person and his lovers. . . . The needlework must be engendered so that a binary is foregrounded and put under erasure. The ground of the needlework, which is the handkerchief, is to be marked as feminine and queer, or as the queerly feminine, because it becomes in the course of the exchange ‘transmasculine’ in its ‘intersexual’ transfigurations of ‘self, other, lover, beloved, melancholy, jouissance.’”¹²

The critical trajectory of Medalla’s work elaborates the initial moment of this essay’s reconsideration of sociality. What itineraries may be gleaned from a queer method of laterality? Perhaps to think about an art history of queerness necessitates a rethinking of how inchoate agencies take form without a predetermined teleological agenda of identity or universality, or even fetishized locality. This is perhaps where a queer methodology of region comes in: Medalla’s practice—as well as the tenor of A Stitch in Time—stakes a specificity at the same time it aspires for universal annotation. This is a poetic gesture, open to agentive intervention. In its iteration in Documenta 5, for example, the work formed part of the “People’s Participation Pavilion,” designed as an open space that “hosted gatherings, discussions, and temporary interventions” that “channeled the artists’ political statements.”¹³ This does not comprise a radical act inasmuch as it is a compelling sociality that is poetic, fictive, and motivated by, in Medalla’s words, “cosmic propulsions.”¹⁴

In delineating a latitude of a sociality that is errant and auspicious, queerness generates a context for practice and, in turn, unsettles and reformulates hegemonic discursive formations of political and social domains.¹⁵ In the work of Nick Deocampo, such agentive and poetic impulses trouble the democratic constituency of the nation by granting queer figures a subjectivity that allows them to participate in its imagination. Deocampo’s documentary Revolutions Happen Like Refrains in a Song (1987) spans his childhood, beginning twenty years before President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and ending a year after he was unseated in 1986 via the EDSA Revolution, a Catholic Church–endorsed, military-backed, and urban middle-class-led uprising. The work comprises home videos, childhood photographs, and Deocampo’s footage from both the uprising and his early works. The footage of the uprising is in medias res, characterized by erratic camera movements, frantic zooming in and out, and sequences shot from awkward angles—from afar, from behind wire fences, through window slits, of the sky as helicopters hover above the protesters.

Key to Revolutions is the question of who gets to participate in the national democratic narrative. Here, this history is mediated by an openly gay filmmaker whose homosexuality becomes his “awareness . . . manner of perception . . . sensibility” and “a form of consciousness.” The work annotates democratic aspiration as it plays out in the uprising, and it is filtered through Deocampo’s cinema verité and his subjectivity, now imbued with the burden of national history. He nominates Oliver, a twenty-four-year-old gay impersonator and performer in the night clubs of Manila and the subject of an eponymous work in 1983, as a figure central in troubling the allegorical conditions of national democracy. Deocampo follows Oliver’s daily routine, interviews people close to him, and shows him performing in the clubs—in one performance, Oliver is Liza Minelli decked in gold, and in another he is butt naked, pulling a thread out of his ass. Deocampo frames Oliver’s story as the story of people outside the canonical narrative of the demos. Oliver becomes an oracle of the precarity of Manila nightlife and represents a facet of the Philippine nation that deserves further attention. In another work, one titled Mga Anak ng Lansangan (Children of the Regime; 1985), Deocampo narrates the stories of those children born under martial law who resorted to prostitution in order to survive. Queer figures such as Oliver and the child sex workers populate the world of Deocampo’s documentaries. In having them appear, speak to, and participate in the narration of national democracy, Deocampo’s work articulates a desire for solidarity, and it prospects a universality that troubles heteronormative constitutions of the demos. As Deocampo narrates: “Oliver was no isolated particular. He did not exist in a space in a life all on his own. It mattered that he existed among us.” In such a trajectory, the historical and the national are troubled, their discourses yielding to anticipatory socialities. Exposed to an errant universality, conventional ideations of nation and democracy are opened to a vaster latitude of identifications, affinities, and co-authorship, offering a reconfiguration of the democratic’s agents and address. Oliver and Deocampo’s encounter fulfills sociality’s auspiciousness, allowing a queer historical agency to play out and proffering a revision of the largely heteronormative narrative of EDSA.

This auspicious sociality reconfigures the art institutional in Yason Banal’s Third Space (Art Lab), an alternative art space he founded in January 1998 in Quezon City, Manila. It is an artist’s home that is also “a laboratory for emergent and vanguard talents who are not yet established or are not embraced by the mainstream, or those who have found success commercially but wish to experiment in other directions. It is an independent unit living on a guerilla existence.”¹⁶ The space was funded with a grant from a “loose group of art patrons” and served as a “time- and site-specific performative installation.”¹⁷

Within Third Space’s predetermined life-span of three years (1998–2000), Banal organized a number of exhibitions, events, and performances that happened within and outside the space. For Queenly Matter (1999), for example, he invited women from different creative disciplines to walk from a shopping mall to the Space, bringing to mind the Santacruzan, a parade of women bedecked in extravagant ensembles as part of religious festivities.¹⁸ The women carried with them bags filled with whatever they deemed necessary for their trek and were asked to photograph onlookers. The photographs and bags were exhibited afterward in Third Space. For Banal, “Unlike the Santacruzan which imposes linearity (orderly procession), passivity (on the part of the mechanical muses), and exhibitionism (through a self-conscious display of beauty), Queenly Matter focuses on each artist’s journey, meaning [they] can choose wherever [they] want to go and do whatever seems worthwhile of the concept and image,”¹⁹ which is “manifested through public interaction and spatial travel on the road and inside the mall.”²⁰ In Kaka- (1999), another notable project, Banal transformed the washrooms of  the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) into temporary exhibition spaces during the presentation of the prestigious Thirteen Artists grant, a national award established by inaugural CCP curator Roberto Chabet in 1970 that has since become an index of success for its young recipients.²¹

Though it productively coexisted with other alternative art spaces active in the 1990s, what distinguishes Banal’s Third Space was that it did not emerge from a prior artist-run collective (e.g., surrounded by water), nor was it an expansion of a gallery (e.g, Big Sky Mind). Banal considers Third Space as first and foremost a house, and thus has kept it accommodating to practitioners of different disciplines and backgrounds.²² As distinctions between institutional, commercial, and alternative practices simultaneously deepened and blurred in the 1990s, Third Space created a program that “encouraged commercial artists.”²³

We discern, in Banal’s two projects mentioned above, an erratic sociality. Queenly Matter facilitated the multiple interfacings of publics, intimating various levels of engagement—from mall-goers to the parade’s onlookers and those who spoke to the participants. The mobility of the performance stitches together various modes of engagement and publicness. Kaka- inaugurates the private spaces of the washrooms as places of exhibition—intervening in the institutional social configuration by convening agents, objects, and situations. In these projects, an institution is shaped by an actual infrastructure as well as by its tropological imaginations. The auspicious sociality constituted by these venues refracts imaginations of institution, publics, and participation.

These works by Medalla, Deocampo, and Banal present exceptional understandings of how sociality becomes errant and auspicious through the experience of “knowing and feeling for other people.” The cases discussed intimate the potential of rethinking an art history of queerness that, in this felicitous imagination, finds a much riskier and more promiscuous framework that grants these practices traction on their own terms, toward more encompassing and creative socialities. This emphasis marks queerness as formative and instituent, as that which excites value and transforms it into vectors of participation in the performative facture of the art object, the writing of history, and the formation of its constituencies. In this schema, queerness is inclined to socialize and craft its public. There is no foreclosure of potentiality. Instead, there are opportunities to come together and trouble prior understandings of sociality. This essay provides an ardent reading of art history, a decision, as queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it, to “trust in [texts or images] to remain powerful, refractory, and exemplary.”²⁴ These three cases bring to a reconsideration of an art history of queerness, and a queer methodology for an art history of region, tendentious trajectories of gathering and assembling encumbered by political valences of sensible socialities.

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