58th Carnegie International —Is it morning for you yet? installed in the Carnegie Museum Gift Shop (2022).
"A multimedia living archive for Philippine arts and culture"
PROJECT TRADE ROUTES is a multi-platform website and living archive for real-time and web-based projects that showcase Philippine art, culture, and heritage. The site provides alternative methodologies and avenues for art, cultural, and educational practices to thrive in more inclusive and egalitarian creative practices. Project Trade Routes documents real-world and real-time activities and houses a network organization and/or cultural practitioner’s website. These domains inform and support one other.
FUTURE WEBSITE COMPONENTS: REAL-TIME AND WEB-BASED
Multidisciplinary Cross-Cultural Exchange Projects
Individual Artist Projects
Real-Time & Virtual Artists and Scholars Residencies
Virtual Studios
Dialogue Forums
Documentary Video Projects
Workshops
Real-World & Web-based Exhibitions
Living Archives
Online Journal
TRADE ROUTES: CONVERGING CULTURES is a collaborative series of themed inter-regional, intra-country, and international cross-cultural exchanges among a diverse array of cultural practitioners and communities. Archived and ongoing projects will be featured on the Project Trade Routes website.
Transmigration and transnational experiences forge new communities as well as cultivate new forms of artistic expression and cultural empowerment. Examining historical and present-day commonalities in arts production strengthens our understanding of human relations and social change projects.
Trade Routes projects are organic cultural immersions in a cluster of specific countries for a set period of time. Projects provide opportunities for cultural practitioners to share and showcase their creative processes, social struggles, and cultural concerns. The participants will include media artists working in video, film, and new media; installation and performance artists; visual artists working in painting, photography, sculpture, and mixed media; academic researchers; curators and cultural critics; and grassroots community workers, many of whom are also artists, cultural activists and educators.
MARKETS OF RESISTANCE (MoR) was the inaugural research project of the Institute for Heritage, Culture and the Arts (IHCA) spearheaded by founding director, media/visual artist, curator, and educator Angel Velasco Shaw at Philippine Women’s University (PWU). This innovative multi-disciplinary project, part of the Trade Routes: Converging Cultures series, was a collaboration between the IHCA and the Baguio City- based artisan/artist collective, Ax(iS) Art Project led by Kawayan de Guia.
The MoR project culminated in a two-week barter-trade exhibition in three rented market stalls converted into pop-up galleries strategically located throughout Baguio City’s sprawling market. The original artworks were not for sale in the traditional form of a monetary exchange. Instead, an interested buyer had to give the artist whatever they requested and/or was mutually agreed upon in exchange for their artwork (e.g. art supplies, staple foods, liquor, household items, books, electronics). In addition, art performance, film screenings, and a poetry reading were also held in different parts of the market. All events were free and open to the public.
With eight PWU students from the School of Fine Arts and Design and Communication Arts and three faculty members, MoR engaged in a series of activities consisting of an interdisciplinary two-trimester course; three cultural immersion trips to Baguio City, Bontoc, and Sagada from June-December 2014; and interactions with Baguio City traditional and contemporary artists, scholars, poets, and community workers. Together, they engaged in a variety of lowland/ highland cultural exchanges: student artist presentations; studio visits; spoken-word events; Baguio artist-led citywide walking tours; film screenings; woodcarving and rattan weaving workshops; site-specific mural making; and documentary film-making.
MoR explored: 1) How the Indigenous Peoples in the Cordillera Region continue to resist Spanish and American imperialism, commodification of their culture, and self/re-colonization; 2) How they preserve their traditional cultures; 3) How Indigenous, non-Indigenous, and migrant Baguio artists create vibrant contemporary art that inspires local and international cultural exchanges and collaborations that reflect ongoing commitments to socially engaged art practices while building and sustaining diverse communities.
Markets of Resistance
MARKETS OF RESISTANCE is a convergence of forty-four distinct voices. Academic, cultural and visual essays, interviews, poetry, and an archival matrix of documents, images and anecdotes woven into a dynamic tapestry, address socially and cultural charged issues: re/self/decolonialization, cultural currency, the vibrant cultural heritage of the Cordillera in the Philippines and the Indigenous Peoples resistance to Spanish and American occupations, Baguio as a multicultural creative hub, radical pedagogy, and tourism.
It springs from the creative and investigative layers of the multidisciplinary “real-time” project, the original Markets of Resistance, a six-month experimental course in a variety of cultural immersions in Baguio and Cordillera Indigenous communities that culminated in a two-week series of activities held in the sprawling Baguio Public Market.
Manila-based undergraduate Fine Arts and Communication Arts students and faculty from Philippine Women’s University, and the Baguio-based AX(iS) Art Project collectively engaged in spoken word, performance art, film screenings, forums, workshops, and barter-trade, which are all inextricably linked to the works in the Markets of Resistance four-volume set (accompanied by a general introduction booklet). The interconnectivity of themes and topics within, across, and between volumes inspires alternative engagements with written and visual literacy — how we read, look, listen and create critical meaning. We invite our readers into this multiverse to meander through these multidimensional materials as if wandering in-and-out of the Baguio Public Market labyrinth— a product of a menacing American colonial past where Cordillera art, heritage, and culture struggle to thrive.
“What an inspiring and amazing treasure trove these four volumes make. Archive and repository of invaluable cultural offerings (visual, historical, theoretical, and personal essays; poetry, art, interviews, and stories), this marvelous curatorial feat of Angel Velasco Shaw is a beautiful, richly woven fabric of collective collaboration and exchange, critical, historical and artistic inquiry, remembrance and creation, composing a project of resistance against imperial and capitalist domination in the model of the Baguio Public Market. Here, even as we confront ongoing colonial practices among the colonized, we might wander and find the vibrance and wealth of our yet unconquered and unmonetized gifts: our own creative and connective capacities for the arts of living otherwise.”
~ Neferti X.M. Tadiar
Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Barnard College, Columbia University
“This book is a thread in the meshwork of projects lashed around the market in its many guises and a tricky term adjacent to, against, within it: resistance. As the site of the daily grind of exchange of different kinds, the market proves to be a point of contact that gives rise to a range of effects, from friction to integration to the repetition of acts. This interdisciplinary, cross-historical collection of essays, documents, and images of art revisits the exemplary market in Baguio and probes it as a historical memory and also as a contemporary event. In this revisit of the market, it performs both memory and event in light of the desire for resistance via the necessary materialist critique and the speculation of other modes of production. Such a desire is viewed not as a textual consummation here. Rather it further clings to the life of a contingent economy of political and aesthetic action. This is a vital effort in bringing together creative form, intellectual practice, and the collective labor to contemplate the ultimate meshwork that is resistance.”
~ Patrick Flores
Chief Curator, National Gallery Singapore and Professor, University of the Philippines
ANGEL VELASCO SHAW is a visual and media artist, curator, cultural organizer, and educator residing in Manila and New York. Her experimental documentaries have screened across the United States, Europe, and Asia, and her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Casa Asia in Barcelona, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. She has curated contemporary art and film exhibitions in New York and the Philippines, and produced multidisciplinary projects in New York, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia.
Her teaching career as an university lecturer spans over 31-years. She has taught Asian American, Gender, Media, Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, Fine Arts, and Communication Arts courses at The New School, Hunter College, Columbia University, Pratt Institute, New York University, Philippine Women’s University, and Princeton University. Publications include Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of An Imperial Dream: 1899–1999, co-edited with Luis H. Francia (New York University Press, 2002), and the anthology Markets of Resistance (Baguio Kunst Book Publishing and Angel Velasco Shaw, 2025).