Wow, Wawi!

Wawi Navarroza throws such wild parties. I wish I could say that. But then it would enter the realm of extravagant fiction. Wawi does throw parties, or hosts them, potluck ones, at least before she leaves for abroad, and when she comes back after being subjected to a clamor for her return. Such are her potluck friends.

She lives and works in a sort of warehouse building that looks largely abandoned, or perhaps her fellow residents are all quiet people who don’t wander about the hallways of multiple floors. The times I’ve been there to bring half of the food and drinks for a hundred peeps (did I say extravagant fic?), I’ve never had to ride the lift with anyone but my own coterie of caterers and servers.

It feels like a setting for a horrific thriller, the way the locus seems well nigh abandoned, but spider-web free, in fact squeaky clean, until you close in on Wawi’s pad’s door and you start to hear a dirty-dancing din of voices, music, yelps and whoopees, moans and groans. But of course I exaggerate.

Sashaying in, you feel as if you’ve entered a humongous whitespace gallery — no, not the one named thus that squats on gentrified Pasong Tamo Ext., near where Wawi exhibits regularly. This one’s several floors up, with windows donating commanding views of the rest of Taguig all the way to Laguna de Bay.

Exhibits what? Why, her unique range of photography, of course. Wawi also rocks, sort of Gothic-punk-like, with a band named The Late Isabel. And her small frame is always clad in all-black outfits that say she’s a different kind of photographer, certainly not of the Lomo-wall mode. Or maybe it’s because her countless friends count poet-rocker Karen Kunavicz among them, herself a buffed vampire slayer. 

In any case, I always bump into a couple of gentlemen photogs at Wawi’s parties. Make that three: Deo Arellano, Butch Perez and Eddie Boy Escudero. And then there’s my cell-phone cam with a Carl Zeiss lens, desperately trying to catch Eddie Boy catching, very professionally, Wawi and Karen and all the other foxy ladies who are also into carnage — that of the vampires of small talk and shallow sosi habits. The conversation is often effervescent, in character with the host, who is likely to pop up from a tehcno-digs-type of settee to plug in a projection of visuals on one of her great white walls, not to disrupt the hundred threads of in-depth dialogue going on, but to force Deo, Butch and me to hunker down deeper into our assorted booze and other techno-social habits.

In any case, starting tomorrow, Wawi exhibits her latest works billed as “Perhaps It Was Possibly Because” starting at 6 p.m. at the hallowed Silverlens Gallery, The haven for avant garde art photographers, off that bend of Pasong Tamo Ext. before it turns into jologs turf with the 24/7 streetside talipapa that slows down traffic on the way to SLEX or Villamor and on to The Fort. 

Wawi had a solo show 18 months ago at Silverlens, titled “Saturnine.” Since then she’s won an Ateneo Art Award, exhibited in the Netherlands, France, Russia, Singapore and Hong Kong, and received the first Asian Cultural Council — Silverlens Foundation Fellowship Grant. That last sent her to New York City’s International Center of Photography for something like four months. It might have been extended had there not blossomed an online appeal for her return since we were all starving for a bienvenida party.

I’ve seen Wawi perform with her band in video, heard her read her poetry from a laptop on the Club Dredd rockers’ stage at Eastwood, guested her on my then-solo hosting show at GNN channel over Destiny cable (which has since been recast into a co-hosting delight with performance poet Trix Syjuco — another story I’ll tell you about sometime), and marveled at her photography, whether it appeared in the pages of Rogue, in CDs, or mounted at her private/public space and at Silverlens.  

And I’m both glad and enthused that another young friend whose own creative pursuits I’ve shamelessly lauded in this space has corroborated, nay, confirmed, my sense of amazement over what Wawi Navarroza has been conducting with her luminous ladyship of the manifold lenses.

Here’s the poet-aesthete Angelo V. Suarez when he’s not into Dada and is therefore legitimately scanning the horizon for critiques or commentary on all things bright and beautiful in our midst. Why, this is a superlative if brief exegesis on Wawi Navarroza’s redoubtable art.

“Not the heads of two strangers whose tops touch each other at a diner, but the neck of a bottle of ketchup jutting out of the counter.

“Not the spectacle of specks from fireworks in the dark, but the specter of a window that seems not so much an opening into the structure of a building but into the structure of night.

“Not the thicket thickening the photographic field, but the image of a bicycle wheel cropped not only by the dominating foliage and its upper border of people but by the edge of the photograph itself.

“Such details punctuate — are the punctum, as Barthes would put it — of Wawi Navarroza’s new exhibition: the spectrum of objects wrenched from the daily contexts of their accidental environments, every picture a departure from the mise-en-scene of chance.

“Unstaged, each scene appears pure, true. As if the photographer has chosen to partake of no arrangement, no intervention; and yet having taken the photographs, she has already intervened.

“For the camera is a disturbance, a recorder that fails to record its own process of recording: How does one document a moment without the documentation altering the moment, how does one document the alteration documentation itself entails?

“Is not a moment defined precisely by the violence with which it is displaced from its studium, by the violence without which a moment is not a moment?

“Between documentary and fiction, there lies the abyss of photography — into which Navarroza consistently falls, with which Navarroza continues to fall in love.”

So when was the last time you saw Barthes quoted and it held up, like a treasure map brought close to an incandescent bulb? Why, that’s prose poetry also serving/servicing as eureka tribute. 

Hmm. So Gelo and I are both in love with Wawi’s wow. So there.

But words are Wawi’s terrain, too. Like most of the authentic young people doing our country proud with their aesthetic achievements, she talks the walk, elucidates with élan on what she creates. Here are excerpts from her Artist’s Statement:

“I don’t feel obliged with the weight of photography to tell a story, a narrative, a report, an expression. I went to New York for some months. Something great must have happened. And I MUST have photographed like mad, drunk on the experience. ‘I was there. Fun was had. Pictures were made.’ Maybe. Maybe not. There is no cohesive story.

“While most photographers are hell-bent on taking the images of the grand, the rare, the shocking, the beautiful, I’m more prone to deny the camera now. I propose this new way of seeing and approach to photographic images because it is more engaging to think of what is beyond the frame or how the image arrived there. To negate is to affirm. This absence is presence. The appearances are evidences that hint at a bigger picture. ...

“This new work presents new tendencies, my new thoughts on photography and how I relate to it, as a lived experience, free from formalist tropes, visual trickeries, and the cargo of the history of photography. It appears that I use photography now to organize ideas and to suggest a less literal reading of pictures.

“In a photograph, I’m interested in what is omitted, obscured, what is outside the frame. ...

“I’m not telling you what happened. But these things are true — because I photographed it.”

Again, there is Barthesian referencing. Maybe Wawi and Gelo can fill me in sometime on Roland the Great’s rubric of rolling thunder. Right now, all I know is that Wawi’s works rock ‘n’ roll.