Pio Abad Reclaims Mapping to Retell Histories of Empire

In The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014), poet Kei Miller sketches two opposing worldviews through mapmaking. The cartographer prioritizes scientific objectivity, while the rastaman understands mapping as subjective and political. ‘Draw me a map of what you see,’ says the latter, ‘then I will draw a map of what you never see / and guess me whose map will be bigger than whose? / Guess me whose map will tell the larger truth?’

Pio Abad’s ‘To Those Sitting in Darkness’ is a lyrical meditation on cultural loss and the possibilities of reclaiming mapping for revolutionary retellings of histories of empire. The exhibition’s touchstone is I am singing a song that can only be borne after losing a country (2023), a drawing of the underside of Powhatan’s Mantle (c.1600–38), a deerskin robe dating to early contact between Indigenous peoples and British colonists in North America. In red pencil on paper, Abad has traced the contours and cracks on the mantle’s reverse, mirroring the abstracted map of settlements in beaded shells on its front. A memorial atlas for ‘the many stolen lands that can never be recovered’, as the exhibition text describes, the drawing is also Abad’s acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of struggle.

Cartographies of dispossession link the remaining works through mapping, tattooing, the body and anti-colonial acts of commemoration for figures partially imprisoned within museum archives. A photographic self-portrait by celebrated artist Carlos Villa is overlaid with invented ink designs referencing trans-Pacific cultural motifs (Tat2, 1971). Hanging adjacent is John Savage’s elaborate etching Portrait of Prince Giolo, Son of King Moangis (1692). In the late 17th century, English pirate William Dampier purchased Giolo as a slave in the southern Philippines. Back in England, Giolo was put on display, his tattooed body a commodity for the curious. After contracting and succumbing to smallpox, Giolo was buried in an unmarked grave in Oxford. A piece of his skin was preserved by the Anatomy College.

Giolo’s Lament (2023) restores a degree of agency to Giolo through a wave to the mother he would never see again. The decorative lines of Giolo’s tattoos have been laser engraved into fleshy pink marble for a memorial that resists the monumental. Across 11 panels, his arm weaves along the wall like a river’s path across a map, disappearing in a gesture of farewell or a hand reaching out. Abad’s Giolo is not a curio or a phenomenon for study, but a son grieving the loss of his mother and his homeland.

On the opposite wall, a series of 14 drawings, ‘1897.76.36.18.6’ (2023), argues for the importance of the personal in comprehending and repairing violent histories of museum collecting practices. After discovering that his London apartment had been a staging site for the 1897 Benin expedition, Abad created intricate ink drawings juxtaposing looted Benin Bronzes alongside personal objects of similar dimensions. A jar of Nutella references palm-oil deforestation in Nigeria while a photograph of a woman resting her head on a pillow speaks to the artist’s grief at the death of his mother. The drawings suggest a way to consider shared inheritances of loss and dispossession through domesticity and relationships to personal objects of deep emotional significance.

Decolonizing inherently colonial institutions like the Ashmolean requires much more than inviting artists to re-contextualize collections. But ‘To Those Sitting in Darkness’ maps one example of how art can trouble institutional norms through interference and imaginative reconstruction. Abad demonstrates that reading collections against the grain can transform museums, even if only temporarily or imperfectly, into sites of connection for anti-colonial struggles and the radical retelling of histories that are always at once political and personal.

Pio Abad's ‘To Those Sitting in Darkness’ is on view at The Ashmolean, Oxford, until 8 September

^{Main image: A kris sword from the Philippines, with wavy blade, silver mounted hilt and wooden pommel, 69.7 cm, donated in 1911. Courtesy: © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford}