There is a new issue creating a social and intellectual/cultural divide: the restoration of the La Loma Chapel, what was then considered an ancient church inside one of the oldest cemeteries in the country.
No one has an optimum memory of that structure. Perhaps, it is even safe to say that no one really cared when it was in its “old” state. But, the Diocese of Kalookan working with Escuela Taller de Filipinas Foundation, a leader in local built heritage conservation, embarked in June 2021 on the project of restoring the said church, in the process undertaking what is called preventive maintenance. The Escuela Taller proceeded to work on the church, with online posts updating those interested in built heritage structures about what was happening in La Loma, a site put up in 1884. Reports were telling us how a great part of the structure was in a state of disrepair, meaning that no organization—church or civic—did any maintenance activity on the cemetery chapel.
This year, the product of that long, arduous labor, the details of which baffled and engaged artists and cultural workers, came out. The plant outgrowths on its roof are gone, the foundations strengthened, and the walls once more massive and sturdy, the chapel in the Campo Santo de La Loma promised to stand for us in the next hundreds of years or more. It has ceased to be aged; its facade is proud and youthful.
It was covered in new plaster and paint. It was a sight to behold, shrouded as it was now in yellow and white. “Yellow ochre,” according to some notes.
There were congratulations all over the Internet. I wanted to shout, “Bravo” but I stopped, for there were sighs and voices of despair and recriminations. “It should not have been touched at all.” “The colors ruined the colors.” Some were specific, calling for “neutral colors,” to which I asked when are colors for churches “neutral.” Is a call for neutrality a call that we do not take sides? How can one be neutral when it comes to churches and built heritage? Can we be non-judgmental regarding hues?
“What a waste,” another observer loudly commented. What was wasted, the colors or the act of preserving? “I like its old look,” finally became the most common conclusion.
Online, Escuela Taller expressed how it is used to such strong reactions. There were words from the group that were meant to enlighten everyone: the yellow hue was based on the residues discovered when the walls were chipped and examined. There was a basis for the decision therefore.
But no one was listening. Or, at least those who were unhappy with the death of the ruins were not ready for any explanation.
The fact is our country has a psychosis of ruins. We are devastated with ruins and, when ruins are gone, we feel we, too, have disappeared. Sadness and obsession, happiness and hubris characterize our negotiated love of ruins. It is a fascination with the destruction that seems to happen before us. This has something to do with our problem with a past that is invented and reinvented, delimited or banished. For some reason, our past always ends with the Spanish occupation. The colonized past is remembered for its beauty, an antiquarian’s dream that reconnects, or so we suppose, not only with Spain but the entire Europe. Colonization for all the abuses and cruelty it imposes on a people is our only version of civilization. Outside of colonial history, we refuse or are ill-equipped to examine any history.
When churches are repainted, we are enraged because we sense our God has been tainted by a color that is not neutral. But how does one tint the face of the Almighty? Is S/He only alive and almighty with decaying bricks and stones covered with moss? Is S/He more potent behind the shrine that will soon come down with time?
I would rather have the old church. That desire reeks of irony. It hides the dynamism that is at the core of an active faith. It subsists on the romance of a false memory of the glory of Catholicism as having molded us into new beings. It is an imaginary that sets aside the view of the foreign faith having been introduced to suppress a land that had its own belief system. It affirms the true power of colonization, which is the banishment of the collective unconscious in exchange for an enforced, conscious effort to embrace the new life. The replacement is never peaceful but built within the core of conquest and occupation and ruins.
This is not the first time we have a vicious exchange of ideas over ruins. Online, some fresh voices affirm how we are all experts on heritage whenever a building is restored or renovated. And yet the same voices are muted when we talk of how we need to decolonize our past in order to create a present that speaks to us as humans free to chart a new destiny, and not I’d rather have the ruins.
In a book, Discourses of the Vanishing. Modernity, Phantasm, Japan, Marilyn Ivy documents Japan’s fear of the impact of modernization, which is the disappearance of those rites and sites that contain the identity of Japaneseness. The nation undertook the preservation of practices and folk narratives as sites of “authenticity.” This mindset parallels our obsession with our own notion of the past, which is located within colonial discourse.
Even as we engage in this debate, the incoming or presumptive Presidential Communications Operations Office chief is asking us to look into other ruins, those brought about by martial rule. She says: “I think everything is open to debate, even scientific theories and established facts are always open to question… We don’t have to come to a conclusion.” She closes this assertion with another plea: “Let us not limit discourse.”
Here are structures of memories about to be renovated, re-gilded. What to do? This time, I am saying: Give me the ruins of Martial Law. Look at them. Remember them. Do not change them. Begin our discourse from there.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
Image credits: JImbo Albano