21AM Museum

Art continues in the metaverse

By Earl D.C. Bracamonte

21AM is a virtual museum created to present contemporary art exhibitions that probe cyberspace while it interrogates its capabilities to alter human reality. This began as a 50th anniversary Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) project to vitalize critical imagination in the information highway.

"This is a digital entity with a vast memory encompassing the CCP's ethnographic and ethno-musicological art. It is an online presentation of its domain of art to the global arena. This 21st century contemporary museum is an intended and dedicated space of critical inquiry," revealed CCP president Arsenio J. Lizaso, during the virtual press briefing on Edsa Day.

21AM opened on the day of the 36th year commemoration of the Edsa People Power event last Feb 25 to stress out and celebrate the new museum's mission of participating in the character and arcs of contests for truth.

"This project began with an ending - the closing of Museo ng Kalinangan - that was bridged by two rituals. So, in 2020, it became 21AM as part of the country's 100-year democratic project. The museum will perform an interrogatory agenda on the art market, as it holds all of CCP's inventory into a single base. With its state-of-the-art Accession Record System (ARS), the delineation between art and craft no longer exists, to make navigation easier," apprized curator Marian Pastor Roces.

Conceptual artist Pio Abad and his wife, jeweller Frances Wadsworth Jones, are presenting their work, "The Collection of Jane Ryan and William Saunders: Restitution in Augmented Reality" as its inaugural exhibition. The artwork references Jane Ryan and William Saunders, standing for Imelda Romualdez and Ferdinand Marcos as legal owners of a cache of jewelry of staggering value. Pegged at approximately US $20-billion, the entire cache was seized by the US government when the Marcoses landed in the United States in 1986, and later handed the seized items to the Philippine Commission of Good Governance (PCGG) for receivership and safekeeping; awaiting court declaration of ownership.

As the new CCP art museum, 21 AM propels the CCP and the Filipino, and other artists - working locally and globally in relation to Philippine material and experience - into contemporary art practice that is informed on one hand, by 21st century cosmopolitan philosophy, and on the other, by locally-generated theory; its institutional work carving centerless spaces - digital and physical - for critically driven art making with Philippine substance, regardless of nationality of the artist so long as Filipino artists are the dominant actors.

There are close to 5,000 objects being curated, with that number still growing in the years to come, so putting them all online will take time.

Art aficionados can visit the virtual museum through www.21am.culturalcenter.gov.ph.