Colonizing Beauty in Jaro Plaza

By Noel Galon de Leon

In the heart of Jaro Plaza, an old civic square steeped in religious tradition and colonial memory, three ballerina sculptures now rise amidst the splendor of a newly installed light-and-sound fountain. Beneath the imposing gaze of Jaro Cathedral and its iconic belfry, these figures stand in permanent pirouette, draped in LED-lit grace, animated by choreographed jets of water and orchestral music. This artistic installation, part of Mayor Jerry Treñas’ “lighted dancing fountain” initiative, is being touted as a beautification effort, a spectacle to attract both residents and tourists alike. But while the surface glimmers with aesthetic delight, a more critical reading reveals troubling implications about cultural displacement, symbolic erasure, and the instrumentalization of art in urban policy.

Tres Ballerinas is not simply a decorative piece but a text to be read, an embodiment of choices, silences, and power. This work exists not in a vacuum of beauty but within a context, a historical plaza rich with community rituals, oral traditions, and vernacular culture. And so, we must ask: Why ballerinas? Why now? And more urgently, who is this art truly for?

Let us begin with form. The ballerinas, elegant, elongated, and undeniably Western, are visual metaphors of grace and refinement. Yet their cultural roots are not of Jaro, nor of Iloilo, nor even of the broader Filipino sensibility. Ballet, a European art form steeped in aristocratic tradition, holds little resonance with the historical and lived experiences of the local community. Jaro, after all, is not a city of tutus and grand jetés. It is a city of processions, of fiestas, of folk dances like subli, binanog, and ati-atihan—forms of embodied heritage that speak to collective memory and local pride.

To install ballerinas in this setting, without any clear attempt at cultural synthesis or local grounding, is to superimpose a borrowed aesthetic onto a space already full of its own stories. It is a kind of visual colonization, a quiet but potent way of replacing one symbolic vocabulary with another, of saying, this is what beauty looks like, and by omission, your beauty is not enough.

Art is never neutral. It always tells a story. And in this case, Tres Ballerinas tells the story of aspiration filtered through foreign eyes. It narrates a vision of progress that mimics rather than reflects, that imitates rather than listens. This is not just about taste. It is about representation, identity, and power.

Public art has long been used as a tool of urban development, a strategy for place-making, branding, and economic stimulation. This is not inherently wrong. Cities should be beautiful; they should inspire. But when the art installed in public space speaks more to outsiders than to locals, it risks becoming alienating. Tres Ballerinas feels curated not for Jaro’s residents, but for the gaze of the passerby, the Instagram tourist, the occasional visitor who will marvel for a moment and leave unchanged.

This transformation of the plaza into a lighted spectacle raises questions about the politics of visibility. Whose histories are we lighting up? Whose movements are we celebrating? When local dance forms and community rituals are rendered invisible, and Western symbols are spotlighted instead, we must recognize what is happening: a rebranding of local identity in service of commodified aesthetics. 

The risk here is that public space becomes stage rather than forum. Rather than being a place of participation, memory, and shared experience, the plaza becomes a backdrop, a space to consume rather than a space to inhabit. This is the logic of the spectacle: make it pretty, make it photogenic, make it profitable. But in the process, what is lost? 

It would be disingenuous to dismiss the project purely on the basis of cost. Beauty has value. Art has a place. But we must be honest: this installation arrives in a context where pressing urban issues persist, including housing insecurity, waste management problems, and inadequate public services. When millions of pesos are spent on an ornamental fountain in the name of progress, residents are right to ask: progress for whom? 

Art in the public realm must be accountable, not only in financial terms but in social terms. Has this installation created meaningful work for local artists? Has it involved community voices? Has it generated dialogue or merely applause?

If art is to have purpose beyond spectacle, it must be grounded in the lives of those who see it every day, not just those who pass by. It must become part of the city’s story, not just a glossy layer atop its struggles.

Tres Ballerinas is not a failure of execution. It is visually compelling, technically impressive, and undeniably captivating. Its failure, if one can call it that, lies in its detachment. It does not feel like it came from Jaro. It feels like it was placed upon Jaro—graceful, yes, but out of place.

The future of public art in our cities does not depend on how bright the lights shine or how grand the spectacle appears. It depends on how deeply the work speaks to its place. It depends on whether we can imagine beauty that grows from within—from the rhythms of local life, from the stories and struggles of ordinary people, from the dances long carried in the feet of the community.

If public art is to mean anything beyond decoration, it must do more than dazzle. It must listen. It must belong. It must remember where it stands. Only then can we say that our cities are not just brighter, but wiser—lit not by spectacle, but by soul.

***

Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in both the Division of Professional Education and U.P. High School in Iloilo. He serves as an Executive Council Member of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.