Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
8-2025
Abstract
This paper examines the tension between spectacle and meaning in the immersive installations of Filipino artist Mark Justiniani, whose mirror-and-light works produce illusions of infinite regress. While Jean Baudrillard warns against the flattening of meaning in the era of simulacra, I argue that Justiniani repurposes the tools of spectacle to resist simulation. His “void of spectacles” stages not emptiness but layered depth, offering a spatial metaphor for archipelagic thinking—fragmented, entangled, and relational. I read Justiniani’s recursive visual structures alongside the poetics of repetition in the Filipino language, where reduplicated forms such as alaala (memory), guniguni (phantasm), bulong-bulong (rumor), or halakhak (laughter) evoke resonance, rather than redundancy. These repetitions, far from empty mimicry, generate emotional and epistemological excess—mirroring how Justiniani’s voids multiply perspectives rather than collapse them. By linking visual spectacle to linguistic rhythm, this paper argues that Justiniani’s work opens a space for imagining island futures beyond the surface economy of global visual culture. His installations do not merely reflect or repeat—they echo, inviting a specifically archipelagic mode of sensing: recursive, nonlinear, and resistant to closure
Recommended Citation
Gomez, L. (2025, August 5). Spectacle and the archipelagic void: Mark Justiniani, simulacra, and the poetics of repetition [Conference presentation]. Critical Island Studies International Conference 2025, Jeju National University, South Korea. Archium Ateneo.
