A Look Back At History

Surrounded By Water

With a name euphemistically speaking for its original location and all its attendant context , Surrounded By Water was founded in 1998 in Angono, Rizal a town known for having a citizen full of artists and where national artist Botong Francisco was from. Wire Tuazon, full fledged resident of said town gathered batch mates from UP Diliman - Yasmin Sison, brothers Jonathan and Mariano Ching, Katrina Miranda, Mike Muñoz, Amiel Roldan, Erick Sausa, Geraldine Javier, Paul Eric Roca, Mike Adrao and later on Lena Cobangbang - to work this thing out. Prior to this they were just organizing among themselves group exhibits at university galleries, the Australia Center, Cultural Center of the Philippines, and at Hiraya Gallery when Bobi Valencia was its curator.

Nestled between a lotto betting station and a mami house, SBW in Angono in its first year was very experimental and fun, actually as people were not yet familiar with artist-run spaces that some local media has clumped together similarly-operated spaces as "alternative spaces" or because it was a very 90s thing to do. SBW had a lot of firsts in its first year - the 1st ever Sound Art Festival, the first Zine convention, the first DogShow, the debut exhibits of emerging artists from our group - Alice and Lucinda holding a vintage clothes-sale way before it burgeoned to a sari-sari store-like industry, Lirio Salvador nearly fasting for three days and performing by one of Angono’s rivers, Bulacan-based artists opening their show with soot-covered performers, Jayson Oliveria seemingly carpeting the gallery floors with his diptychs ill-measured for the walls, Kreskin Sugay punching out one of his paintings, Jose Beduya painting the main road white and nearly being run-over doing so, Manny Migriño, Paul Mondok boring a hole through a wall and installing a surveillance camera, Chico Beltran, Louie Cordero, Gary Pastrana, Alvin Zafra, Ronald Anading’s guinea pigs, Katya Guerrero’s puzzling drive by sightings work, Vic Balanon, Ferdz Valencia, Bandoy and Lakay Ranjo. Well, that’s in between snacking goto in nearby Scrapyard and the boys carousing by the videoke bars just across the highway.

Then there's this sudden realization that we have to have money to fully operate this thing. With the help of older artists Gerardo Tan and Jose Tence Ruiz we held a fundraising raffle. This coincided with a kindly couple, Mr. And Mrs. King who owns the Pied Piper Place in EDSA to turn over said space, a former bakeshop cum cake school and music school, and convert it to another branch of SBW. This was in 2000.

However, juggling two non-commercial spaces all at the same time is quite handful, so we all decided to stick with just the EDSA branch and give up the Angono space.

Anyway, SBW in EDSA lasted for two good years and we had more members coming in at that time like – Chiristina Dy whom Yasmin Sison met while facilitaing art workshops in Ayala Museum, Eduardo Enriquez, whom Wire met at an art congress in Palawan, Lyra Abueg Garcellano and Louie Cordero who has consistently been exhibiting at SBW and with the group for exhibits curated by mentor Roberto Chabet.

But again, as the case always with such spaces and due to a multitude of factors, SBW has to up and move. It was also the time when Katya Guerrero is re-envisioning her family’s printing press in Cubao as an artist community. So she offered us a space in that compound in 18th avenue for a minimal fee. Barely surviving in that space for a year, we finally called it quits by 2003. This demise coincided with Furball, the production house, expanding and taking over the space where SBW was.

That commences the story of Surrounded By Water. This may have been slightly different with other artist-run spaces but that the struggles are more or less the same because the people who man these spaces are primarily and essentially artists. As such, there would always be a finiteness to these things. Nonetheless, these spaces taught numerous artists how to better manage their own careers. Is this the reason why business school AIM is now offering seminars on art management, ditto with Ateneo de Manila University ?