The Volcano's Children

Exhibit notes for Walong Filipina: Daragang Magayon
March 30 - April 21, 2007
Liongoren Gallery

There resides a devastating beauty in Mt. Mayon's gentle slopes and smouldering facade: how it possesses the capacity to evoke the most serene and picturesque scenery on one day and bring about wanton and terrible destruction on another. These intertwined realities make the will to recreate what is lost an inevitable part of human life in this part of the archipelago. This year's Walong Filipina exhibition attempts to salvage precisely this: beautiful narratives of persistence, creation and struggle as told by the volcano's very own children.

Thus, Walong Filipina: Daragang Magayon is also a tribute to the creative spirits of Bicol-based cultural workers. They may not always be "Fine Arts" artists, but also women skilfully working in various forms and media which may not always be accorded due recognition by academic institutions. It attempts to straddle the traditional dividing lines between fine arts and crafts, by simultaneously exhibiting works by women artists and artisans alike. Thus, the exhibit features two painters, Lina Llaguno-Ciani and Tosha Albor, art educator Raquel Almonte, handloom weavers Socorro Napa from Camalig, Albay and Benita Tucay from Buhi, Camarines Sur, and craftswomen Mercoria Basas, Eustaquia Barce, and Marissa Mendoza.

The artists featured in this year's Walong Filipina are all literal and figurative survivors: survivors of super-typhoon Reming's wrath, of poverty and grief, of tribulation and trial, of journeys into foreign lands. Their works may be initially seen as quaint tokens of beauty and creativity, but quietly testify to their stories of diligence, will, and survival as women, mothers and cultural workers.

Several of the works in the exhibit are personal accounts of the typhoon that severely devastated Bicol in November 29, 2006: a day when many worlds ended, abruptly and without farewell.

Mercoria Basas from Barangay Binitayan, a craftswoman and mother of five children, was at home when typhoon Reming swept through Albay. Faced by rapidly rising floodwaters, the Basas family along with three other households, sought refuge atop the roof of their house, all huddled together to escape the waters from above and below. The house's foundations collapsed at the height of the typhoon's fury, throwing all of them to the mercy of the torrential floods. Mercoria, or Mer for short, managed to hand over her bunso (youngest child) and other children to her husband, Francisco, before being carried off by the current.

Mer was repeatedly pushed underwater by the swirling waters, barely surfacing before another wave would push her back into the abyss. "Parang ipo-ipo. Maitim ang tubig, puro buhangin. Ang daming kahoy na malalaki [sa tubig], tulad ng niyog," she recalls. (It was like a tornado. The water was dark, and full of sand. There were lots of large trees in the water, such as coconut trees).

Mer was swept along with the floodwaters to another barangay, barely surviving the ordeal. Francis, her 11 year old son, stayed alive by clinging to a tree and holding on to it for hours.

Mer and Francis were the only ones from their family to six to survive the flood. Her husband, eldest child of 13, and Francis' other siblings aged 6, 4, and 2 years old, all drowned as the current swept them in different directions. Their bodies were recovered in different barangays in the days following the flood.

Months later at an evacuation center, Mer and many other survivors would later articulate their sentiments through dreamworks—images produced out of scrap fabric— facilitated by the House of Comfort Art Network Inc. (ARTHOC) for the trauma, interrupted international art project. Drawing upon art's capacity for self-articulation and healing, ARTHOC workshop participants were asked to draw their dreams and "dream houses" using bond papers and colored pens. These images were later transferred through cutting, stitching and sewing onto textile grids, using discarded clothes and simple running stitches.

One of Mer's dreamworks in the Walong Filipina exhibition quietly articulates her longing for a family lost: a representation of each of the Basas family members is stitched on to a brightly-hued fabric, where the words "Mga pamilyang nagsasama kahit kailan" (A family that always stays together) are inscribed.

The narrative of loss is more direct and straightforward in the works by art educator Raquel Almonte. A Music and Arts teacher at the San Lorenzo National High School in Tabaco, Albay, Almonte documented her ordeal as a typhoon survivor in Reming Remains, a visual and narrative account of "a day that marked the beginning of pain".

The sketchbook captures Almonte's flashbacks as the floodwaters formed a "pool in [her] house", and how she and her family managed to escape a watery grave by breaking open the window grills. Personal recollections are alternately written down in English and Tagalog to illustrate the texts. This visual and literary diary was composed chronologically in a sketchbook sent to the gallery: rendered simply, but with vivid accuracy.

Almonte would later on participate in the ARTHOC workshops, and apply the processes utilized in producing the dreamworks to her own classes as an art teacher. This is illustrated in photographs of Almonte's children's art workshops aiming to highlight the youth's role in fighting drug abuse, where children articulated their sentiments on the issue through sewing and fabric. The class also produced theater masks from cardboard and tissue paper and dreamcatchers from abaca twine, fibers soaked in dye, and yarn threads.

Other dreamworks in this year's Walong Filipina exhibition articulate the survivors' longings for a peaceful, prosperous, and simple life in the land of their birth: a dreamwork by Marissa Mendoza, for instance, alludes to dreams of settling peacefully in Albay. The image is reinforced by symbols of security (a home and a gate), agricultural growth (e.g. rice fields), environmental protection (trees and abundant flora and fauna), and protection of cultural heritage (the façade of Mt. Cagsawa). Also evident in the work are remnants of the natural disasters that have displaced Marissa and many others: black clouds signifying the typhoon season and the smouldering façade of Mt. Mayon in the near distance. Still, other works depict school buidings in addition to houses: a longing for the reconstruction of educational and health structures that have been devastated in the typhoon's wake.

Marissa Mendoza did not find the fabric dreamworks difficult to produce, in a technical sense. Orphaned at a young age, Marissa started sewing during her sixth Grade, "dahil gusto ko at kailangan kong gawin upang mabuhay," she says (Because I wanted to and because I needed to do it to survive). A widow for more than 13 years, she eventually migrated to Manila, where she worked as a seamstress at a jeans factory, housekeeper, and haircutter in order to support her children. Marissa went back to Bicol last October and has remained there ever since.

The exhibition also features native crafts produced by these women artisans. In addition to the dreamworks, Mendoza and Balas also create intricately-decorated bags made from local materials. Mendoza, who can decorate around three bags a day, bases her designs and images on whatever is "in demand" and "kung ano ang mag-click" (whatever 'clicks' [with the public]).

The hand-made bags on display at the Walong Filipina exhibition are mostly the works of another Reming survivor, Eustaquia Barce. Lola Taquing, as she is fondly called, is widowed and 77 years old to date. She continues to produce bags even while housed at the evacuation center in Albay. Alongside the bags are handwoven blankets by Benita Tucay, who hails from Lourdes in Buhi, Camarines Sur, a predominantly agricultural community comprised of peasants. Here, many women earn a living as handloom weavers, producing the fabrics at home. Tucay learned the craft of handloom weaving at the age of 15, when her mother passed on the skills to her. Now, she usually finishes two kumots (blankets) made out of semi-cotton fabric per day.

The Walong Filipina: Daragang Magayon also features various native abaca products from a handicraft business started by veteran handloom weaver Socorro Napa from Camalig, Albay. Coming from a family of weavers, Napa started a humble handicraft home business by herself in 1978, armed solely with only "one worn-down weaving loom". The business has since them expanded to emply more than 400 weavers, 200 traditional looms, and 200 carpet weavers producing crafts for national and even international markets. The works on display feature the company's abaca-based products, including placemats, runners, utility boxes, tapestries, abaca lamp, decorative vases, and abaca carpets. Like the individual survivors from Albay, Napa products, too, is starting again after sustaining adverse structural damages by typhoon Reming.

Neither has the typhoon spared the seaside studio of expatriate Filipina artist Lina Llaguno Ciani in Sogod, Bacacay, Albay. A resident of Italy for the past several decades, Llaguno-Ciani has worked back and forth from her lakeside home outside Rome and her studio in Albay, fronting the Pacific Ocean. Llaguno-Ciani's works in this year's Walong Filipina exhibition, entitled Leaf 1 and Leaf 2, presents a delicate play of images that reside in natural forms. The leaf, more than a simple object, may evoke in its intricate structures images of aquatic life—fishes, marine life, and seagrasses—or the wonders of the forests: dragonflies, flowers, and mystical nymphs. These forms may denote the pristine natural environment where Llaguno-Ciani grew up and worked in, most of which now in a state of assault and fragile recovery in the wake of natural and man-made environmental tragedies.

The exhibition also features works by Tosha Albor, daughter of Filipin abstractionist Augusto Albor. She is the youngest among the group, the Walong Filipina's bunso for this year. Although she was born in the Philippines, Albor eventually emigrated to the US and England, where she is now based. She took up Fine Arts and finished with a degree in Sociology at the University of London. When viewed in the context of the entire exhibition, Albor's use of abstract images evoking industrial aircraft, flight, and alienation speak up against the repeated dislocation of self and memory from one's homeland of pain and crisis—the greatest tragedy of all. ###