It is an image that ironically anticipates the “inherent” subservience of certain groups, while at the same time bringing into question the systemic asymmetrical dialogic, political, and economic relations between the dichotomous constructs.

Art has always been construed as the embodiment of desires, significations, or visions that enable a human being to efficiently deal with himself, with the world (be it a physical world or an incorporated one), and with the world’s systems (whether naturally occurring or politically constructed, either practical or impractical, empirical or theoretical); Democratising Identities, therefore, necessarily seeks to be no exception.
 
The right panel shows a typical informal “grainy” old photograph.  This is a picture of my mother (the one wearing a hat) and her siblings when they were still young at my grand-father’s farm in southern Mindanao, Philippines. I have seen this photo long ago as a child, needless to say, this image is a very familiar one. If one way to challenge perceived assumptions about universality and absoluteness is to cultivate what is local, I have asked myself, what could be more local than scavenging a potential image from one’s family photos?  The simultaneity of this private photo together with the images of cultural artefacts appears to evoke and resolve certain dialectical interactions.
 
On the other hand, the left panel depicts a Subanen woman based from a turn-of-the-century photo-graph taken during the American occupation in the Philippines. I believe that the indigenous peoples (especially indigenous women) are the epitome of the oppressed, the exploited, and the “commodified.”

They are the archetypal marginalizes, the underprivileged, and the paradigmatic undervalued individuals. It is an image that ironically, though purposively, anticipates the allegedly “inherent” subservience of certain groups, while at the same time bringing into question the systemic and almost irredeemably asymmetrical dialogic, political, and economic relations between the dichotomous constructs: the so-called “First World” and “Third -World” countries, or, among the different social classes.

It is indeed possible to argue that there could be an analogical parallelism here; especially if we are capable of recognising, even just for a moment (that is, as a tentative contention), that a truly “post-colonial” condition has occurred (though I am not at all speaking with utopian connotations); and we are being persuaded to be the beneficiaries of the supposedly consequential transformation. Post-colonialism seems to envision and advocate a just, humane, and liberative transformation. Corollary, if globalisation could truly be recon-figured into an honest, race-neutral, pro-justice, pro-human system, perhaps only then could it defectively attempt to democratise the world, hence, democratising identities, which could be treated as a precondition towards enormously revitalising and empowering localities.