Picturing ambiguity

Picture, if you will, a museum as a study in discursive ambiguity. Picture, then, an unsettled quality suffusing the Negros Museum, established in 1994 within a handsome 1930s provincial capitol built in the spirit of a design by the famous Chicago architect Daniel Burnham for American colonial government buildings in the Philippines. One wonders if it is the building itself — resting, as it does, in neo-classical splendour and in close proximity to an open air and usually quiet wet fish/meat/ vegetable market across the street, near the busy pier of this capital city of Bacolod, in the environs of the remarkable sugar-cane plantations of this province of Negros Occidental — that communicates this vague sense of incongruity.

Ambivalence, too: but this perhaps issues from seeing this stately capitol together with a museum within it that does not intone stately narratives. Five years after it opened, the museum still conveys an indeterminacy that is doubtless amplified by the very determined qualities of its architectural setting. For it may indeed be observed that any act of representation here — for instance, sounding voices stilled by the sugar industry — inevitably sounds half-hearted, perhaps annoyingly so, within the elegant ballroom of this building, emblem of the politics that guarded the immense wealth created in this province by mono-cropping. Framed by perfect acanthus-leaf capitals atop columns edifying the sixty-foothigh ceiling — uplifting this space the way sugar-cane is said to have done for this province — the museum's critique-driven curatorial design can only appear effete or irresolute.