Ivan Emil Labayne

Born in Caloocan City, Ivan Emil A. Labayne is now a Baguio-based writer, cultural worker and copyeditor. He is part of the art collective Pedantic Pedestrians. As a group, they have held a Book Launch without a Book; released four folios online, a Torture Manual, an ONCEPT Series, a psycho-geographic work on Magsaysay Road, Baguio, Ngayon ay Buwan ng Wika, This is a Working Zine, Bionotes in Negatives among others. Ivan?s creative and critical works have appeared in academic journals Daluyan, Katipunan, Entrada, Kritika Kultura, Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia and the Cordillera Review and in online platforms such as Cha and Transit. Ivan is also maintaining a regular column in the Baguio Chronicle and contributes articles to the Northern Dispatch.

Excavating the Trauma: Notes on the Teng Mangansakan’s Forbidden Memory

If the emotional is too on-top of the speaking voice, surrendering to a guiding thought an idea, a proposition, a question can pass as urgent.

In watching the premiere of Gutierrez ‘Teng’ Mangansakan’s Forbidden Memory last 2017, I had to quell a kind of rage gearing to erupt in the wake of a reopened rupture its closure is a delusion that has rapped the country’s memory for decades.

When we speak of Martial Law, we speak of the human rights violations; we speak of the infrastructural progress that birthed international debts we are still paying today; we speak of Imelda’s lavishness, we speak of the Marcoses’ theft; we speak against the temptation to just forget or move on.