Norberto "Peewee" Roldan is an artist and curator, working at the forefront of cultural artistic practice in the Philippines. He is currently artistic director of Green Papaya Art Projects, a multi-disciplinary platform he co-founded in 2000. He also founded Black Artists in Asia in 1986, a Philippines-based group focused on socially and politically progressive practice, which in 1990 initiated the VIVA EXCON Biennale in the Visayas region. Offering commentary on the social, political, and cultural conditions of the Philippines, Roldan works with found objects, such as old photos and magazine clippings. His materials are drawn from everyday life, and deal with contemporary issues informed by history and collective memory.Roldan has used the tactics of an “assemblagist” to put together his own commentaries on subjects that he cares about, often employing the material embodiments of various genres and themes in a single collage. In The Matriarch from Negros and The Wedding in Negros, Roldan embellishes the base fabric of traditional Visayan “patadyong” with silk screen prints, embroidery, flattened bottle caps, bamboo strips, herb bottles and baby amulet beads, as a means to bring the material culture and collective memory of the Visayas region to the fore, displacing the Manila-centric art discourses and production. Concerning his process, he has written: "Assemblage is not only mixed-media but also cross-disciplinary. You can pick up anything and put them all together in a coherent form. Assemblage is akin to production design in filmmaking. It builds the context for storytelling without giving the whole story".
