Angelo V. Suarez's "Dissonant Umbrellas: Notes Toward a Gesamtkunstwerk" is a collaborative work with Keith Dador, Costantino Zicarelli, Stephanie Yapnayon, Mike Mendoza and Macy Cruz, Dwein Balatazar and Julie Grafia, Mark Salvatus, and Sandra Palomar whose disparate but conceptually interrelated visuals are strung together by a sprawling critico-creative text rooted in marginal traditions in poetry, raising such aberrant issues like the place of materiality in the mainly abstract nature of literature. Besides yanking together the visual and the literary, it also attempts to blur distinctions between reader and writer, speaker and addressee, etc., ending up also fusing Filipino and English into a continuous, verbal idiom. In a sense, Dissonant Umbrellas is a verbo-visual discourse about verbo-visual discourse itself.

Prof. Oscar V. Campomanes: "A reference to Dada this late in post-modernity? Our residual moderns here might scoff at the gesture as passé. A resuscitation of the Wagnerian notion of Gesamtkunstwerk (total art)? Our fiercely genre-bound artists are likely to raise their brows in skepticism. A 'speak-back' to the once-revolutionary insights of Saussurean structuralism? Local literary critics who style themselves as 'post-theoretical' are certain to dismiss the effort as once-startling but now unwarranted. But no matter, and who cares about the self-appointed cadres of modernism, theoretical discourse, and the avant-garde (themselves already anachronistic positionings in our present times)? This work of Gelo Suarez and his collaborators is best read as simulacral (reproductions without originals). More aptly is it regarded as virtual, moving toward and beyond what people prize nowadays as performance. It is a creative text that refuses to cohere and in that sense is also critique, subjecting our age-old certainties about artmaking to crisis and unsettlement. Riddles/ripples shall eddy from it, washing over and across our tightly guarded turfs!"