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‘Field Notes’ Translates Record Keeping Into Documenting Social Movements
Field Notes, the newest exhibit by Mark Sanchez at UP Fine Art Parola Gallery, builds its exhibition around the links of personal experience and public mourning. The show extrapolated personal observations into a broader narrative of societal forgetfulness. More than that, it builds itself as a public reference to ensure the remembrance of social movements and the people behind it
The works of Mark Sanchez here revolve around the national democratic struggle of political activists in the country. Sanchez sees the works exhibited as a way of processing loss, and as future study materials in moving forward—that mourning need not stop the works we devoted our lives to.
“In the scale of the exhibition,” they wrote, “they are excavated, extracted, and translated to serve as past references.”
The Links of Social Movements and its People
Field Notes can be split into two sections: a monument of the departed, and a study of social movements. Sanchez’s works have a flair for the sociological, a willingness to analyze the emotions into something deeper and systemic.
This certainly shows up as a theme in the exhibit, especially with the gigantic study diagram in the center of the exhibit. This diagram details the sociological relationships between different classes and mass movements, and shows the ways we intersect. From there, it show us how our goals can line up together to form coalitions that unite instead of divide.
Sanchez makes a case of seeing protest movements as “social organisms” which grow, regenerate, and adapt to its environment based on where society is today.
“[This] emerges from aroused masses organizing themselves mobilized towards a historical objective,” they wrote. “It persists to overcome the external entities that inhibit its growth or outright kill it. It persists in continuing a path reachable in a foreseeable stage in the future where we, as a species, are free of this rigged game that benefits just a few and kills off the majority of life in the process.”
Remembering and Memorializing
The second half of Field Notes memorializes the departed. When one enters the exhibit, one finds a row of paintings representing Sanchez’s comrades who died between 2020 and 2024. Their faces are painted with a black background and put in frames of wood. The artist saw this as a personal way to honor their lives and their choice to serve the masses.
Later on in the exhibit, viewers will find three tarpaulins of photocopied pictures. These pictures represent dead men who remain unidentified until now. Sanchez added this to the exhibit to showcase the sadism of the state and their apathy towards their victims. He points out the injustice of keeping a record rendered “unreadable” for anyone who can gain access to it.
“It is cruel for an institution—particularly those that maintain the status quo of the ruling class—to keep corrupted files,” they started. “There is something sadistic, psychopathic in keeping records about an unidentified erased person that they summarily executed in the middle of the night at the height of the War on Drugs.”
Record Keeping as Rebellion
In the end, Field Notes is less about note-taking in itself and more about where the act leads to. We see Mark Sanchez use their experience to document social movements and memorialize the people who sacrificed their lives for the masses. And we also see how it can be used to display the apathy of the people in charge.
Whether in the privacy of our inner selves or in the public of a gallery space, Sanchez finds ways to synthesize the traumas of the past into the lessons of the future.
Photos by Elle Yap.
Related reading: ABAY Tribute Exhibit Showcases the Artist’s Role in Resistance
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