Fire and Death
A Labyrinth of Ritual Art
1988
As early as 500 B.C., Heraclitus of Ephesus already knew the nature of fire. He wrote: “Fire, the underlying primary substance, is the prototype of the world which is an ever-living fire with measures of it kindling and measures of it going out.”
The news report from the Times Journal dated May 15, 1981 is terse and stark:
A millionaire’s house in San Juan, hit by an hour-long fire at dawn yesterday, became the fiery grave of three members of the family and one of the maids.
Arson investigators found the charred bodies of prominent Manila architect Otilio Arellano, 65, his wife Liwayway Almario, 65, and their daughter Felicitas Arellano-Reyes, 33, and a maid identified only as Marietta, 17.
Razed by the fire which started at 4:44 a.m. was the Arellano’s two-storey house at 154 J. Arellano St. The house was built before the war and renovated by Otilio Arellano recently.
"Notes from me to my self" (From Fire & Death '88)
"Ritual art" does not give too much importance on the created artwork as such, be it a painting, sculpture, an offering of flowers, drawings on the sand. The POWER of the created object comes NOT from having attained 'excellent standards' (in terms of superior aesthetic sense or taste) but from the STRENGTH OF SPIRIT infused into it by the practitioner of the ritual, i.e. the creator. It serves a purpose; often, that is to liberate him by reconciling his self to the "Allself" (Oversoul?) or to the particular deity that he invokes.
Yes there was a time for shamans - a Time when Art & Life were One... when 'art making' was subservient to the needs of the spirit and the tribe.
Exactly seven years after the tragedy, Agnes Arellano, her younger brother Deo, and her husband Michael Adams designed the exhibit and wrote the texts for "Fire and Death: A Labyrinth of Ritual Art" which opened to visitors on May 14 in commemoration of the deaths. The exhibit design which featured a labyrinth was done in collaboration with and executed by Architect Rosario "Ning" Encarnacion on a 1,000 sq. m. ground where the house and garden once stood. In charge of the photography was Deo. He had managed to take pictures at different spots just after the conflagration and these were marked by spirit houses with the photo inside each Ifugao house.
The doors opened at 6:30 in the evening, and the visitors came in, not noisy and chattering as in usual gallery events, but in a hushed silence, with only the sound of their footsteps crunching on the gravelly paths as they proceeded into the labyrinth, each path laid with different ground materials like red volcanic cinder, black beach sand, black and white pebbles and shells, and each material producing a different sound.
Lines from T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton" set the atmosphere:
Footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage which we did not take
towards the door we never opened...
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden
Shall we follow?
These elegiac lines may be applied in hindsight to the tragic event and may echo in the aftermath of the fire and the gray years that ensued, filled by haunting memories. But at the crucial moment itself, at the center of the fire was an intense petrifying horror only to be followed by the unconditional yielding of the consciousness and the physical body to the engulfing blaze - flesh and blood transformed to ashes in an instant.
Why did the design of the exhibit-installation take the form of a labyrinth? Perhaps because the grand ancestral house seemed to have changed into a devilish maze to the trapped occupants as they desperately tried to flee to the exits but encountered only dead-ends. Such a design could make possible the replication of the experience, although on another level, and to grasp its full essence.
The labyrinth walls were made from recycled lumber, antique doors and windows with panes of capiz or stained glass, and bamboo poles. This large and convoluted maze branched out at certain points into halls, galleries, altar shrines, wayside shrines, and dead-ends, twelve in all, filled with all kinds of mementoes, such as photos or slides of family members, retrieved from the debris and exhibited on the walls, as well as reliefs and sculptures reflecting ancient beliefs on death and the afterlife. These were likewise accompanied by resonating lines from T. S. Eliot’s poetry and passages from James Frazer’s Golden Bough, the largest compendium of myths and rituals from all over the world. Illustrating these were multi-media images drawn from the world religions, Hinduism, Christianity, Zen, classical Greek, and Central and South American myths. At each dead end one was confronted by a shrine, the message of which was contained in a poem composed by Michael Adams, member of the Philippine Literary Arts Council and publisher of the poetry journal Caracoa.
Farther inside the maze was the Black Gallery where lay what Adams described as “three piles of bones reddened with dull ochre of a forgotten fire ceremony.” One is reminded of indigenous rituals of burial which often followed two stages: primary burial in which the corpse was interred in the ground, then, after the passage of some years, secondary burial in which the bones were exhumed, painted with red hematite to suggest living blood, then placed inside a burial jar.
There were also halls, each with its own individual character. The Hall of Doors was covered with images of conflagration, described as a “Rorschach test” of burning reds, yellows, and blacks. Were these the doors which, alas, refused to yield to anguished efforts to break through? The Hall of Sounds was hung with wind chimes, angklungs or bamboo xylophones, hollow coconut shells and bells of all kinds, to be interactively played with by the visitor. Were these meant to be warnings and sound alarms which, however, failed at the crucial time, but were being belatedly revived?
One dead-end showed a barred wooden door featuring a double-headed ax, signifying the original Labrys. There was a dried cow’s skull above the ax, referring to the original minotaur of the labyrinth and the bull heads in ancient Minoan temples.
Occupying primacy of place in the labyrinth were the shrines to the members of the family in order to appease their spirits. The corner dedicated to the father, Otilio, is near a statue of the Virgin overlooking the Shrine of the Mother where Liwayway’s flower garden used to flourish. The site features lines from Michael Adams:
This Diana
Watered roses
Raised children
And sang to them.
She has departed the garden
And the untaken paths.
Combined imagery from Greek mythology and Christianity lead to Felicitas’ shrine bearing her picture. She was but thirty-three years old. Again, lines from Michael:
Innocent
Fragile roots
Early death
…
Delphic
Intelligent
Spring rain
…
The visitor’s attention is called to a collage of fresh blossoms on the wall called “Liwayway’s Garden”, with actual photos taken from the old garden. This is followed by a blow-up of the first bloom — a rose — in the mother’s garden after the fire, aptly entitled “Bukang-Liwayway” (Break of Dawn), with which the exhibit ends.
Observe the excrement of death.
...three piles of bones
Reddened with the dull ochre
Of a forgotten fire ceremony.
. . .
Peer closely into the darkness,
Observe a world without Isis,
and without us,
the final relics
bred in imbalance
before the Holocaust,
propelled by the misuse
of cosmic dust
an energy source
turned to abuse
By the Death of Isis,
The fading of the Tao,
Our failure to be us.
. . .