Working Group Meeting Hosts Special Guest Renan Laru-an Working Group Meeting Hosts Special Guest Renan Laru-an

The gathering began with a warm and familial moment where the Cell took over and introduced us to their friend Renan Laru-An.The Cell all shared the moment they met Renan for the first time. Clara Balaguer met Renan at an event, and two months later they published a book together. Czar met Renan at a book binding session, Alfred Marasigan met him in print before meeting him in person, and Isola Tong has no memories of meeting Renan, but is looking forward to meeting him. These personal introductions allowed the Working Group to humanise Renan's impressive biography.

After a moment of getting to know each other, Isola shared a popular catchy 90s song, recalling how she used to think it was Indonesian, only to find out later that it was in fact a Filipino song. We were introduced through this personal anecdote - showing how people in Manila can be unaware of the cultures of the southern Philippines - to the theme of alienation from certain regions in our own countries. This particular anecdote highlights how little we can know of certain parts of our own nations, and how popular culture can highlight what is lacking in national awareness about one's history.

Renan took us on his research journey through southern archives. He began by exploring how working with southern archives allows for new ways of thinking about national archives and histories. The peripheral condition of being from the South entails not being impressed by current practices of archiving, and thus creating alternative narratives and archives. What conditions are then imprinted and impressed on the southern archives?

Based on Annabel Teh Gallop's research on the Koran manuscripts from Mindanao, two conditions were highlighted. First, the notion of care: as you look into the manuscripts, you can see that they were taken care of by local people. This provides an alternative notion to the rhetoric of custodianship, which has been a violent practice. Secondly, the manuscripts were often attached to colonialism, even the material conditions such as the paper used, being from China or the Netherlands, but, the Koran manuscripts used locally made paper. From these points, we can establish that there were artists in Mindanao, who were starting to produce art and began a publishing practice. This highlights that there are artists and art histories, and not just items of heritage and art tradition.

As Renan shared his screen, and let us enter his research process, we were introduced to the work project he has been occupied with since 2018. He is currently rewriting the content of _The Mindanao Cross _newspaper headlines, rethinking them through loose, flexible and ever-changing categories. This is not a project based on translation, but on theorisation, one that uses the existing archives of the newspaper to make a new archive, reclaiming Southern narratives. He is focusing on what the existing archives present, and also being close enough to them and in dialogue with them so as to be able to re-frame, imagine and understand them.

The overwhelming data in the project highlights the battlefield that is each line, the process and difficulties of naming and labelling the categories, which is why the process remains flexible and ever-changing, broad enough to be able to include rather than exclude content. The spreadsheet creates a matrix (from the word matriz in Spanish, matris in Tagalog, the womb, the intimate nature of an organisation), visible in the way it holds information.

In a discussion between Clara and Renan, we collectively thought out loud about the need to hold information in a womb-like matrix, that allows for nutritive forces to find their way to what is being gestated within X and Y axes. Among these binary systems, how to find curvatures within the linear matrix? Can turning our attention to the multiple tangent points open up readings in a hyperlinear, anti-linear way? The greater the multiplicity of data points to turn on, the higher the possibility of representing fluid life forms.

Renan's work with The Mindanao Cross highlights the fluidity and presences of archives, as archives can move and be interpreted. When using archives, artists can enact the function of historians, translators, curators and pedagogues. Working with these archives becomes a gesture of alternative knowledge and counter-memory, as Renan remixes and shuffles material. By exposing forgotten histories, we are reminded that archives are indeed something that we do, rather than something that simply exists.

As Renan made space for us to step into the intimate, intricate research process and the living, moving archive, we got to meet Renan and be part of his world. Next time we can introduce him to you as our friend.

Renan Laru-an is a researcher based in Sultan Kudarat, the Philippines. He creates exhibitionary, public and research programmes that study 'insufficient' and 'subtracted' images or subjects at the juncture of development and integration projects. Current ongoing projects include But Ears Have No Lids (2021) and Promising Arrivals, Violent Departures (2018).

Since 2017 the Public Engagement and Artistic Formation Coordinator of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network, Renan Laru-an is co-curator of the 2nd Biennale Matter of Art 2022, Prague and has co-curated the 6th Singapore Biennale (2019), the 8th OK.Video - Indonesia Media Arts Festival (2017), and the 1st Lucban Assembly (2015). He is Curatorial Advisor to the 58th Carnegie International 2022, Pittsburgh.