When you go up a bit, you gain; when you go down a bit, you feel disappointed, gloom(y), lost. You can go all the way down to death. Somehow, there seems to be a difficulty getting up. Death seems so final. Nothing seems so very very very irrevocable and permanent. Then, if it is, what about the nothingness before you started? So, don’t you see what we’ve left out of our logic? And this is part of the game rule to the game we are playing. The way we hoodwink ourselves is by attributing powerlessness with nothingness. We don’t realize that it’s a complete logical fallacy. it takes nothing to have something. You wouldn’t know something without nothing. You wouldn’t know what the form is without the background space. You wouldn’t be able to see anything unless there was nothing behind your eyes.”

(Excerpt from ‘The State of Absolute Nothingness’, Lecture by Alan Watts)

The theme of nothingness usually spells out a conundrum of how it can best be tackled without ending up as a futile attempt to explain a very abstract concept. Nothing Matters intends to give light to this very topic. If we digest the two words ‘nothing’ and ‘matters’, a paradox of sorts is being formed. It can be read in the usual context, wherein ‘nothing matters’ simply means as if everything doesn’t mean a thing; an alternate interpretation of this is when ‘nothing matters’ can mean that there is importance and weight in the idea of the absence of something (void, nothingness). Further interpretations are explored.

What usually comes into mind when we are asked to imagine what nothing is? It’s kind of conflicting since if you’re able to imagine what nothing is, it already becomes something; it then loses its essence. How then are we able to successfully interpret such a topic? The mind may be able to comprehend this but fail to reiterate it in the physical world. If we think of what matters, what are the things we see? An attempt to represent these ideas visually is the main focus of this exhibition. It also poses a topic for discourse: “mahalaga yung wala, o walang mahalaga” (nothing matters, or nothing matters).

-Jerome Destacamento