Renan Ortiz’s exhibition Dokumenterte: Documenting Duterte in Images 2016–2022 assembles political cartoons that chronicle the incendiary rhetoric and social ruptures of the Rodrigo Duterte presidency (2016–2022). Duterte’s rule was marked by populist speech acts that normalized violence, with human rights organizations citing up to 30,000 extrajudicial killings linked to the state’s drug war. In 2024, Duterte’s referral to the International Criminal Court at The Hague reframed his public presence within juridical silence, even as his supporters mobilized cardboard effigies of the former president in protest.

This paper examines how images produce sound as a mode of political discourse. Political cartoons rely on caricature, exaggeration, and speech bubbles to render Duterte’s rhetoric audibly legible, preserving his voice as excess, threat, and spectacle. By contrast, cardboard cutouts present a mute, dignified, and sentimentalized Duterte—an image stripped of speech yet mobilized to stand in for collective grievance.

Through a comparative analysis of cartoons and effigies, this paper argues that visual forms mediate political voice differently under conditions of accountability and repression. While cartoons amplify contentious speech, cardboard images translate silence into bodily presence. Together, these image practices reveal how political discourse persists, mutates, and is contested through visual means in the aftermath of state violence in the Philippines.

Authors:
Jose Santos Ardivilla, University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Jose Santos “Chong” P. Ardivilla is a political cartoonist and writer. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD) College of Fine Arts Department of Visual Communication.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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