"According to [Professor Jose Maria] Sison, the cultural worker uses the tools of art in order to uphold the narratives and convictions of those who are marginalized, dispossessed, and persecuted by the militarized state. He or she is an educator, agitator, and organizer, all in order to maintain and to enact—to perform—the symbolic universe of the unacknowledged state that is not so much an administrative entity as a collective condition. The long cultural struggle of the Filipino people has created a state in itself, a detailed network of references, histories, and symbols that define a people’s identity far beyond what a state could ever contain. We are speaking here of art’s stateless state …
“Writer and politician Upton Sinclair wrote that the goal of the artist at the dawn of internationalism was not to ‘make artworks,’ but to make a world. This is exactly what seemed to be at stake here: contributing to the conditions of representation after liberation—to the possibility of future history. Is that not the task of any cultural worker?”
—Jonas Staal, “To Make a World, Part I: Ultranationalism and the Art of the Stateless State,” e-flux journal no. 57, Sept. 2014