By Hannah Jo Uy Images by Pinggot Zulueta “An ordinary day in my life starts with nothing,” said Mideo M. Cruz. For this seasoned artist, creative work is a continuous process, with some pieces taking years, while others decades, to finish. Taking on a life of their own, ideas transform, defined, he said by adoptability, whether economic, political, or cultural. Amid the spontaneity, however, Cruz stressed that the concept and execution of the work are meticulously studied, turning meditative and serving as therapeutic healing for the artist’s distress. “I do not believe in branding,” he said. “I do not intend to follow a particular formula or style to retail myself as a commodity.” All ideas emerge in an organic fashion prompted by an object or a situation, as Cruz only responds to his immediate surroundings. Current situations, according to him, while taking time to get digested and manifest, eventually persist as part of his oeuvre. “Even if I hide from the repetitive grayish damask design or sanitized whitewash aesthetics,” he said, “the flux of emotion will always leak.” Iconography defines every society’s sub structure and through satirical, often comic images Cruz slowly introduces trauma with religious and political nuances. “I deconstruct the images to remove the revered and reintroduce the sacred icons of our gods (politicians, celebrities, etc) as a realization. These gods—as tools of commerce, as weapons of subjugation.” In his recent show, “Ziggurat,” he revisits an old series from 2008 while he was on a residency in New York. This chronicles his initial immersion in a big city he described as the epitome of late capital spectacles with “various cultures ritually meeting up in the center.” “People are working hard,” he said, “creating their own towers and building their own cells. The experience is an abstract of the macro civilization we are living in.” The collection, Cruz said, touches on self-doubt and asks: “Are we working to prosper or just to isolate ourselves into several boxes of our own aspirations creating this infinite ladder that grows into ziggurats?” In Victory, we see towers with tips from old trophies and a base of discarded tin cans as Cruz begs us to recognize that in almost every triumph there is usually a requisite of disaster. The artist, as many might know, is no stranger to controversy, yet he remains committed to authenticity. “Telling something that defies the norms is difficult,” he said. “We are raised by our institutions to conform to the natural order. We are told to obey, but our conscience requires us to tell our version of  the story.” For Cruz, freezing the significance of the moment us critical. Amid criticism and misunderstandings, the antidote to Cruz’s sanity is living off grid, away from commercial mainstream and doing initiatives to establish community links to propagate local cultural strength. For more than four years, Cruz has been re-establishing his connection with the village that molded his basic perception of society, leading to the development of Bangan Project Space, a community retreat cultural center “where creativity and lifestyle congregate.” This is a welcome change following 20 years of urban explorations. “My rural conservative upbringing,” Cruz said, “helps me to be more sensitive to my surrounding.” His understanding of art history, Cruz emphasized, is not through textbooks but “from real life, reflective of real domestic events and tradition.” This guarded him from homogenous stimulus from social and mass media. Commenting on the progress of Philippine art scene, Cruz said that being young as a nation, art as part of current cultural representation still lacks maturity. “How can we expect maturity if nationhood itself is not yet fully cultivated?” he asked. “We must dig deeper beyond the surface, beyond what we usually see. Art is more complex than what we expect it to be.” For this artist, discussions are very helpful as opposing thoughts are powerful methods to give birth to new ones. “We must encourage dialectics based on ideas and not on profit,” he said. “The sudden surge of the art market is helping a lot of artists in managing their economic survival but not in suppressing mediocrity.” Cruz, as an artist refuses to be defined, quoting Heraclitus’s famous saying that “the only thing that is constant is change.” “I don’t want to impose a creative formula to my creative process,” he said. “There is no limit to imagination. As an artist my role is neither to define my process nor to give translation to my creations. My role is to provide images that best represent our era.”