Remembering EDSA: The Role of Information Studies in Preserving Democracy
As we commemorate the anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolution and the end of the Martial Law Era, it is crucial to reflect on the power of archives in safeguarding the truth. Archivists and allied information professionals play a key role in ensuring that records of this period remain accessible for future generations, resisting erasure and distortion of memory.
UP SLIS is committed to teaching ARM and LIS as disciplines that serve society. Beyond simply organising information, our work ensures that records of the past remain intact, accessible, and truthful. Check out some of the work our faculty has done on the EDSA People Power Revolution:
📖 Buenrostro-Cabbab, Iyra S. “The Voices of Images: Photographs and Collective Provenance.” Archival Science, September 3, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-024-09456-8.
This paper presents how the concept of provenance is expanded and reconceptual-ized from being an organizing principle to an interpreting community that describes, contextualizes, and breathes life into photographs. As social objects, photographs warrant a nonlinear, collective provenance because of their intrinsic ability to tran-scend time and space while bringing various entities to come together, form a com-munity and relationships, and reflexively exercise memory work and meaning-mak-ing. Collective provenance includes various individuals who are not necessarily in the same locale or setting, but are united through a shared identity, a common past, and an imagined future in relation to the phenomenon portrayed and documented by the photographs. This study, which is based on my PhD project on archival pho-tographs during the martial law years in the Philippines in the 1970s–80s, draws on Chris Hurley’s parallel provenance, Tom Nesmith’s societal provenance, and Jeanette Bastian’s co-creatorship of records. I use the case of one photograph taken during the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution that ended the dictatorial rule of the Marcos, Sr. regime in the Philippines. Through oral history interviews enabled by photo-elicitation, the collective provenance interacted with the photograph, inter-preted both the photograph and the event depicted, and positioned themselves in the wider and more dominant narrative of EDSA. The full paper can be accessed at https://rdcu.be/dSTQe
📖 Olgado, Benedict Salazar. “Emancipatory Erasures.” Membrana – Journal of Photography Theory and Visual Culture 6, no. 1 (June 18, 2021). https://doi.org/10.47659/mj-v6n1id106
In her series Erased Slogans (2008–), artist and activist Kiri Dalena scours archives for photographs of protests in Manila during Martial Law Era under the Marcos dictatorship. Dalena digitally scans these black and white images and then painstakingly removes the texts on the protest signs. Her exhibition shows these landscapes of blank white surfaces held up by unidentified bodies. This essay focuses on Dalena’s work and situates the photographs of protest in the nexus of memory and activism exploring the act of erasure as a work of liberatory memory. Erasure is not simply an accomplice to forgetting. Remembering through the aesthetics of erasure is a radical act of resistance that plays with time and reconceptualizes hope. Dalena’s work shows us that the emancipatory significance of photography lies not in its fixity, but in its ability to ask us to read what has been taken against what has been left behind. Because like liberation, memory is not something we have, but rather something we must do collectively.
📺 UPSLIS. “For the Record Special Episode - Archives and Remembrance,” September 23, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ipkVo0TRRI
This special episode of For the Record remembers the struggles and courage of the Filipinos under the dictatorial rule of the late president Ferdinand Marcos. With the Marcos regime’s imaginary of foisting the ideology of New Society on a country hounded by corruption, military abuse and human rights violations, Filipinos struggled for their rights, freedom and social justice. Decades after the reinstatement of democracy in the Philippines, many Filipinos seem to have forgotten this era and have divided memories and perception of this period. On September 11, 2020, #ArawNgMagnanakaw trended on Twitter amid the approval of the HB 7137 by the House of Representatives declaring September 11th as a non-working holiday in Ilocos Norte to commemorate Marcos’ birth. The main objective of the episode, in line with the annual remembrance of the victims and martyrs of Martial Law, is to examine the importance of archives in the various acts of remembering and forgetting, history writing and understanding, reconciliation and collective healing.
Are you passionate about keeping memory, resisting historical revisionism, and preserving democracy? Check out our graduate programs by visiting upslis.info/studywithus
Published: 2025-02-25 02:02:23