All In, All Presence: Making Communal Space
Written by Marcus Harrison Green; Photographed by Andrew Wallner
Romson Bustillo chooses to see the world, and to experience it, as beautiful. Through printmaking, mixed media, space coding, installation art, and painting, the multidisciplinary artist populates spaces that question and claim presence. His layered artworks, largely non-representational, create a communal space for viewers to participate and become active co-creators in discovering meaning.
“I think it’s important,” he says, “particularly when you’re making work that’s going out in public, to find a place for people to have an opportunity to learn.”
For Bustillo, engaging with the world—finding beauty in the people and spaces around him—has been a lifelong practice. His mother is also an artist, and brought creative expression to life for Bustillo and his artistically inclined siblings. Together, the family immigrated from the City of Cagayan De Oro, on Mindanao Island in the Philippines, to the Columbia City neighborhood of South Seattle. For the first time, Bustillo didn’t look like most of his neighbors. But communal space was everywhere in the South End of the 1980s, and Bustillo embraced it.
“It’s something that culturally, and by the beauty of chance, I was exposed to and was normal from the get-go. You could also say that it’s a survival skill when you come to a new place…. You find a way, and for me, that was to engage with the new folks around me.”
It was a time of impromptu gatherings and unplanned happenings—a generation preceding an age of hyper-scheduling and smartphones. “You don’t think much of it when you’re a kid,” he says, “you think that it’s normal.”
To walk through the multi-ethnic streets and past the buildings of South Seattle is to walk past the stories that built Bustillo’s life. No space in the neighborhood went unexplored as Bustillo and his friends roamed from the community center to the playfields and down to the Boys & Girls Club. Each place, each image, each memory became a vision—the structural framework of Bustillo’s visual vocabulary.
Bustillo’s collective interventions play upon these experiences. His work bridges and innovates where community and collective space converge. More than can be held, hosted by Seattle University and the Hedreen Gallery, was an immersive, interdisciplinary exhibition consisting of large-scale collagraph prints, sound, video and performance. Engaging artists like Seattle choreographer and dancer David Rue in intervention performances, Bustillo created nuanced networks of visual cues, codes and colloquialisms to invite conversations to happen. His poems scored the exhibition. Thirty “snappers” watched and listened, responding individually and collectively to the dance, the movement. They joined in, responding to the conversation, fingers snapping, words called out in collective witnessing.
Bustillo’s memory of the evening was one of a trance. Each accompanying artist—all in, all presence—embodied and enacted the negotiation and claiming of space.
“The why that stands out to me is that it was really about that space, and that space wouldn’t have been so powerful if that ‘we’ element wasn’t there.”
