RESBAK!

ARTS & RESISTANCE AGAINST THE DRUG KILLINGS IN THE PHILIPPINES

This exhibition and showcase coincides with CCNY’s Third 2024 Critical Perspectives on Human Rights Conference, April 17-19, 2024, which aims to explore the contested legacy of human rights in increasingly uncertain times.

RESBAK
RESBAK (RESpond and Break the Silence Against the Killings) is an interdisciplinary alliance of artists, media practitioners, and cultural workers. The primary goal of RESBAK is to advance social awareness with regards to the killings brought forth by the Duterte administration’s “war on drugs.” “Resbak” is also a slang term for gathering reinforcements to get even with someone who did something wrong. Through various art forms and platforms, RESBAK seeks to give voice to and empower the most vulnerable sectors targeted by the state-endorsed killings.

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CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON HUMAN RIGHTS CONFERENCE
Economic inequality, racism, sexism, and multiple refugee crises have engendered and exacerbated the rise of political extremism. Addressing such issues, as well as many others, the Critical Perspectives on Human Rights Conference aims to explore the contested legacy of human rights in increasingly uncertain times. It seeks to foster dialogue and scholarship from a wide range of perspectives. Some conference presenters are scholars and activists who continue to view the human rights project as a moral and ethical challenge to power; others see it as an enabler of political and economic domination.
The Critical Perspectives on Human Rights Conference participants seek to reassess the origins, foundations, and contemporary forms of human rights discourse, ideas, and practice today, seventy-five years on. The Critical Perspectives on Human Rights Conference is part of a larger initiative at The City College of New York, CUNY, shared between the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership, the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies, the Division of Humanities and the Arts, and the President’s Office dedicated to human rights studies, public programming, and scholarship.

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SUNY/CUNY SOUTHEAST ASIA CONSORTIUM
The SUNY/CUNY SEAC is an interdisciplinary initiative to promote research, teaching, and related efforts around Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Americans in New York’s public universities. The Southeast Asia Consortium (SEAC) aims to develop institutional infrastructure and robust connections across New York’s public university systems—the 64-campus, 370,000-student State University of New York (SUNY) and 25-campus, 270,000-student City University of New York (CUNY)—with the wider New York public and policy community, and with counterparts in Southeast Asia. The statewide SEAC links faculty, students, alumni, and surrounding communities.

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THIS PROGRAM IS MADE POSSIBLE BYSUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium

WITH THE SUPPORT OFCity College of New York
New York Southeast Asia Network
Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts

FROM MANILA TO THE WORLD: Global Dialogue on Human Rights Through Art

PANEL DISCUSSION + OPENING RECEPTION

THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 2024 @ 6:30-8:00pm EST

City College of New York
25 Broadway, 7th Floor, NY, NY

RESBAK will be contributing to a panel discussion that explores the role of artists in human rights and social movements, featuring insights from grassroots organizers in Metro Manila, Philippines, and the Filipino diaspora in the US and Germany. The panel will provide an overview of the current political context surrounding the "war on drugs" and will trace RESBAK's engagement since 2016. The group's involvement, encompassing roles as artists, community workers, and social workers, will be highlighted within a broader network of mutual aid groups for survivors, as well as its participation in the internationalist organizing of activists.
The activists involved will offer distinct perspectives: delving into the artmaking process, they will illustrate how RESBAK creates spaces of sociality through concrete examples such as zines, exhibitions, and performances. Another focus will be on security concerns and the repression faced by cultural-political organizers in the Philippines, placing these challenges within the broader historical context of killings and red-tagging as methods of intimidation. The panel will also explore the positionality of artist-organizers and the potential for global solidarity and broader coalitions, particularly in the realms of abolition, harm reduction, and transformative justice.

This event is held in conjunction with the opening of the Resbak! exhibition and the launch of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium program.

PANELISTS

BEA MARIANO
Bea Mariano’s community-engaged work started with volunteering for Back to Square 1’s Off-Site/Out of Sight project in 2015, and from 2017 continues with RESpond and Break the Silence Against the Killings (RESBAK). As an artist, she experiments mainly with words, images, sound and video. At present she is trying out — slowly, gently, and out of necessity — automatic and expressionistic approaches to art-making. She also transcribes, translates and codes. She received her BA in Art Studies from the University of the Philippines Diliman. She was a fellow of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum’s Leaky Archive project in 2022, engaging with the institution’s Philippine colonial photographs collection. Currently, she is working on dalumat, dalamhati, dignidad, a web-based entity on/of decoloniality.

GLENN PHILIP MARTINEZ AQUINO
Glenn Philip Martinez Aquino has lived in the Bay Area for over 20 years but now lives in the Central Valley of California where he was born and raised. He is a grandson and son of Filipino immigrant farmworkers and has worked on several community based projects as a community organizer and as a filmmaker. Aquino holds an MFA in Cinema and is a founder of the film production company, SINE68 Films, that aims to use film as a tool for social change. His films primarily focus on Filipino stories in the US and the Philippines and projects that interrogate the Filipino diaspora. He is currently an active member of RESBAK (RESpond and Break the Silence Against the Killings) an interdisciplinary alliance of artists, media practitioners, and cultural workers advancing social awareness with regards to the killings brought forth by the Duterte administration’s ‘war on drugs’.

JASMINE GRACE WENZEL
Jasmine Grace Wenzel is a community organizer who crafts from different angles with texts, as translator, editor and writer of different artistic and journalistic forms. Her research and organizing focuses on the collective liberation from colonial continuities, political aesthetics, and the freedom of movement. She received her training in media and cultural studies at Bauhaus-University Weimar, Goldsmiths University London and her M.A. degree at Humboldt-University Berlin. Her perspective emerges from community research and organizing in translocal and digital learning spaces such as Mapping Philippine Material Cultures at SOAS London, Learning in Island Ecologies (LiIE) at the School of Commons in Zurich, as well as in local feminist and anti-colonial community spaces in Berlin. Recently, she facilitated a workshop on diasporic archives and collage making with Queer Analogue Darkroom at Savvy Contemporary Berlin.

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