Coordinating Body: Black Artists in Asia and the Practice of Maintenance in a Time of Hunger

Abstract: This essay discusses the concepts and forms of cultural work explored by Black Artists in Asia (BAA), an artist organization initiated in Bacolod City, Negros Occidental, in central Philippines in 1986. Through an ecofeminist critical framework of hunger, or gutom in the vernacular, BAA's cultural work will be analyzed within specific postcolonial realities of the former sugar capital in the 1980s and 1990s, which were marked by socio-economic turmoil and militant human rights violations. The essay attempts to trace the intangible aspects of BAA's cultural work, which was pursued through the medium of craft and community theatre, transforming into grassroots trading, and proposes that the core of BAA's cultural work was the practice of maintenance.