Briccio Santos: Beyond binaries

Briccio Santos has been on a creative display super-roll for the past two months.

From June 25 to July 25, he exhibited photographs collectively billed as “Manila Berlin Express” at Casa Roces Gallery in San Miguel district of Manila, right across one end of Malacañang Palace.

From June 27 to July 16, it was “Mutations,” paintings and installation mounted at Archivo 1984 Gallery on Chino Roces Avenue in Makati.

Currently on show, having opened on July 16 and to last till Sept. 16 at Alliance Française de Manille on Nicanor Garcia St., Bel-Air 2, Makati, is “Clignancourt,” a thematic selection of photographs with verses celebrating the famous flea market in the outskirts of Paris.

On opening day, a book with the same title was launched, collecting the same photographs and text, with others that couldn’t be accommodated for lack of space. The scintillating images are in large prints under framed glass.

The exhibit travels entire to Bangkok when it pulls out of Makati, then makes its way to Paris early next year, where the visual magnetism started, and imaginably, galvanized the parallel text of ideas and imagination right out of the artist’s multi-faceted duende.   

Briccio has also been, or rather remains, a filmmaker, an auteur at that, serving as scenarist, cinematographer, director, and occasionally as art director. He has melded images and words before, tossed in music as well. And it’s never just a simple salad of creativity that he serves his audience.

Still memorable is his black-and-white, 16mm film Damortis of the mid 1970s, a haunting psychodrama revolving around a faith healer. He was one of our earliest indie filmmakers.

Before that, I believe there was the short film Manikang Papel. It wasn’t until the mid-‘80s that Damortis made the rounds of European film fests anew to gain some measure of acclaim. Then there was Cavalier of the Winds, filmed in 35mm in Moscow in 1994. 

He was named as an Outstanding Filmmaker in 2003 by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts or NCCA. In 2005, his Ala Verde, Ala Pobre was a winner in the Cinemanila Festival.

Briccio has had four decades of sporadic, itinerant filmmaking under his belt. Much of his creative time has also been devoted to photography and painting, as well as to his advocacy for the proper preservation of Filipino films. 

In 2010 he was appointed Chair of the Film Development Council of the Philippines. He instituted Sineng Pambansa, a national cinema program that organized film festivals from Laoag to Tawi Tawi.

As FDCP chair, he has also spearheaded the establishment of regional cinematheques, a key component of Sineng Pambansa. Cinematheques in Baguio, Iloilo, Davao and Marawi screen films from the National Archives, apart from serving as venues for workshops and symposiums on various aspects of filmmaking.

Through its Film Cultural Exchange Program involving other countries, FDCP also sends classic foreign films for screening. Another program sends Sine ng Masa mobile cinemas with large LCD screens and generators to far-flung barangays without electricity.

 In 2013 Briccio Santos was awarded the rank of chevalier by France, joining other earlier Filipino members of the Légion d’Honneur. The honor was for “his efforts in developing and promoting the Philippine cultural identity through cinema, particularly in the preservation of Philippine film heritage through the creation of the National Film Archives of the Philippines, which is an advocacy greatly supported by France, known to be the birthplace of cinema.”

Now he comes full circle once more, as he always does, with his inherent eye for visual tropes carefully selecting mise-en-scenes from an environment that is chockfull of all kinds of curious attraction: mannequins, elegant old clothes, art, mirrors, keys, clocks, lamps, cutlery, glassware, music items, vinyl records, Tin Tin posters, furniture, jukeboxes, pinball machines, busts, statuary, figurines and figures such as of Napoleon Bonaparte, Wonder Woman and a unicorn’s head, a tractor, a motorcycle, a scooter, a Renault, an infinite assortment of bric-a-brac that fill up the streets in the flea market called Marche aux Puces, which today “thrives with a  reputation as the largest flea market in the world.”

In this grand ukay-ukay center also called Clignancourt, the last metro stop north of Paris, Briccio has spent countless weekends, watching “the elegant order of clutter on sale while at the same time observing the manner in which this clutter was being traded for the world to see.”

It wasn’t until a return visit 12 years since he had first made it a weekend routine that he decided to do a follow-up on the first photo book he did in 2007, Paradox of Silence, on impressions of the streets of Paris.

“So I brought my camera and imagined minute narratives to add to the already rich and diverse images emanating from the fertile clutter at Marche aux Puces in Porte de Clignancourt.”

The first photograph in the book is of an interior alley at the flea market, with paintings lined up on the floor, an old man in a red shirt sitting on a couch, and the svelte figure of a lady walking well past him, garbed in black coat and pants, her back towards the camera.

This inspires Briccio to start out with a narrative:

“Once upon a time a couple who lived happily by the River Seine was suddenly awakened by the Parisian mob, who dragged them to their place at the guillotine. The man’s last words to his wife were, ‘I will wait for you in our next life.’

“He watches all day long not knowing why. But for every lady that passes, she could be the one.”

What he calls verses are more of textual constructs that occasionally take the shape of a poem, but also become extended stories, or simply documents his own relationship with the images that catch his eye. There is even a stab at philosophy.  

Here’s the poetry, nearly as surreal as the image it extols:

“A unicorn that eats stuffed toys is a horse who cheats/ hiding behind torsos, a string that feeds while/ a dark hand plays an old Wagnerian tune/ A helpless figure watches the clinical procedure/ Like an assembly line he whistles for others to stop/ desperately trying to save the herd from falling/ into the hungry mouth for the final trap”

And here’s the personal philosophy, which also presents itself as an ars poetica for photography:

“When instantaneous coherence of form presents itself to the viewer, the artist acts as a catalyzer, so as to place that same form into a visual context. Our daily lives contain a multitude of such forms either as a background, foreground, or even within the absence of it. Its presence in various contexts often invokes an aesthetic logic to whatever medium is used to produce these intended forms. Everyone is part of everything else; even the viewer is himself being viewed. Just like no one can escape language. Choose your subject and it leads to multiplicities of perspectives. Those lines, I believe, are those seen by the cubists and the visual narratives used by surrealist painters. These are lines that overcome, subjugate, transcend commonalities that we employ in our daily lives. It’s a form of deconstruction. By choosing intuitive lines it can surpass, I believe, even mathematical equations allowing fresh new undiscovered realities to emerge with a new perspective.

“So what does it have to do with the picture on the left?

“Everything!” 

Indeed, this myriad-driven artist is enamored with everything that engages the eye, heart and mind, from essential forms to the legion of narrative arcs and curlicues they may imply. With this series of exhibits, he sports a wingspan whose reach reveals much more than an auteur’s display.

He isn’t just visual-textual. Briccio Santos lofts himself beyond simply being a binary star. As multi-tasker, he is manifold in his ministrations.