Abstract
In her series Erased Slogans (2008–), artist and activist Kiri Dalena scours archives for photographs of protests in Manila during Martial Law Era under the Marcos dictatorship. Dalena digitally scans these black and white images and then painstakingly removes the texts on the protest signs. Her exhibition shows these landscapes of blank white surfaces held up by unidentified bodies. This essay focuses on Dalena’s work and situates the photographs of protest in the nexus of memory and activism exploring the act of erasure as a work of libatory memory. Erasure is not simply an accomplice to forgetting. Remembering through the aesthetics of erasure is a radical act of resistance that plays with time and reconceptualizes hope. Dalena’s work shows us that the emancipatory significance of photography lies not in its fixity, but in its ability to ask us to read what has been taken against what has been left behind. Because like liberation, memory is not something we have, but rather something we must do collectively.
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