Cut the Censorship, Shatter the Silence

The local Philippine censor's board, the MTRCB, has just given an X rating to a film project calling for the release of abducted (and still-missing) activist Jonas Burgos. Like a third-rate thespian, MTRCB Chairperson Consoliza Laguardia unconvincingly tries to justify this outrightly fascist gesture to the public by saying that the film was "unfair" and "undermining the faith" in the government.

You know what really reeks of unfairness and one-sidedness, Consoliza? It's the Philippine military abducting Jonas and "facilitating" his disappearance up to now. It's the Army refusing to give Jonas' own mother a copy of their "classified" report on his abduction, even at the orders of the highest court of the land. It's the AFP Commander-in-Chief remaining silent on all the killings, tortures, and disappearances attributed to her men for the past seven years.

You know who's really behind all these moves to "undermine the faith" of the people in the Philippine government, Madam Laguardia? None less than the Arroyo administration itself, by the sheer atrociousness of its actions, pronouncements and policies. While you're at it, the MTRCB should seriously consider giving the X rating to all television footage of President Arroyo's annual SONAs and rosy speeches. The last time I checked, seeing the President deliver her daily litany of lies was enough reason to spawn a new breed of destabilizers and dissenters.

I've seen the excerpts of this "X-rated" film at Cinekatipunan. The scenes are no less "unfair" and "one-sided" than the average TV commercial or news report that airs on TV. And the MTRCB need not worry about the Burgos family's filmmaker-supporters further undermining the people's faith in government through the work: that happened way before, starting from the very second Jonas was abducted by the MTRCB's fellow fascists from the military.

"Scenes in the film are presented unfairly, one-sided
and undermines the faith and confidence of the
government and duly constituted authorities, thus, not
for public exhibition."

Read that sentence again and savor the perfection of its follies! Not only is it glaringly "grammatically wrong": it' hinges on the dangerous notion that the only works fit for public consumption are the ones that affirm the status quo --this effing government!--and fit into the its appalling standards of "objectivity" and "fairness" (defined mostly by the current Justice Secretary).

While we're on the topic of censorship, I'm reposting below an article written for FOCAS: Forum on Contemporary Art and Society, as part of its country reports on art and censorship. Many more cases of suppression have piled up ever since I submitted this draft earlier this year; the MTRCB's X-rating on the Jonas Burgos film being the latest.

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The Philippines: Culturing censorship, waging political repression

The Philippines makes for an interesting study in censorial practice: from the auspices of American colonial rule to the impositions of the Marcos dictatorship, and finally to the current regime of crisis and dissent. This survey briefly cites selected aspects of censorial practices directed against Philippine cultural workers in 2006 and early 2007, including in its scope cases of state-condoned political repression against progressive artists, 'legalised' censorship involving duly-constituted government agencies and legislation, and self-censorship arising from the artist and community's adjustments to material and economic exigencies.

Sins of suppression: State-condoned political repression as a form of censorship

Censorship refers to 'the institution or practice of censoring' which, in turn, may be defined as suppression or excision of any matter 'thought to be immoral, seditious, or otherwise undesirable.'¹ While often this has been exercised against cultural works and practices, there are also cases when the artists and authors themselves—physically and materially—become the very subjects and targets of suppression.

Assaults against the body politic are, in themselves, forms of censorship. The erasure of images, words and acts pale in comparison to the erasures and even eliminations of actual living and breathing bodies: the very physical planes through which ideological interventions are enacted. Viewed from such a perspective, threats of violence, death or disappearance among the ranks of cultural workers become the most virulent and potent form of censorship there is. In the Philippine setting, such assaults take on the form of state-condoned repression against a targeted segment of the population identified with progressive politics, including cultural workers.

The documented instances of censorship and repression among cultural workers seem to be part of a more systematic state campaign against its perceived enemies and would be better viewed in the context of the current political situation, which is briefly outlined here. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who assumed the position after former President Joseph Estrada was ousted by a popular mass uprising in January 2000, has herself been called upon to resign from office by various societal sectors since 2001. These calls for Arroyo's resignation are based on continuous political scandals and allegations of graft and corruption against the President, as well as human rights violations and still-unresolved counts of massive electoral fraud in her 2004 Presidential bid (documented in voice recordings of several wiretapped conversations allegedly between Arroyo and an election commissioner; these were publicly disseminated through CDs in 2005). By the end of 2005, political rallies calling for President Arroyo's resignation had escalated, both in frequency and in scale.

The Arroyo administration, however, has responded to the calls for her resignation through intensified political repression by military, legal and administrative means. On 24 February 2006, President Arroyo issued Presidential Proclamation 1017, declaring the entire Philippines to be under a 'state of emergency' and quickly acting to quash any opposition to her administration under the pretext of cracking down on 'destabilisers' and 'terrorists'. At the same time, the number of what Philippine human rights activists have termed as 'extrajudicial killings'—assassinations of legal activists by suspected state-sponsored assassins or elements of the military—has risen to more than 832 since 2001.² Many of the human rights violations against cultural workers have occurred in what Philippine human rights activists refer to as 'militarised' areas: regions or provinces where a large concentration of military forces are deployed for counter-insurgency operations against the New Peoples Army (NPA) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The degree of political repression in the Philippines has solicited the attention of the international community, including the Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU),³ the largest international organisation of parliaments of sovereign states, and Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions.

Cultural workers associated with progressive organisations have also been victimised by this wave of overt political repression. On 28 April 2006, in Tagaytay City, Cavite in the southern Tagalog region, the Philippine police and elements from the Philippine Navy arrested without warrant and detained poet and peasant rights advocate Axel Pinpin, a 1999 Fellow for Poetry in Filipino at the University of the Philippines (UP) Institute of Creative Writing and the author of a self-published poetry folio entitled Tugmaang Walang Tugma (Rhyming Without Rhymes). He was reportedly compiling materials for a second poetry book at the time of his arrest. Also arrested and detained were four other members of the Kalipunan ng Magsasaka ng Cavite (KAMAGSASAKA-KA, or Farmers Federation in Cavite). Pinpin and his companions, collectively tagged as the 'Tagaytay Five', were physically and mentally tortured while under police custody and were charged with rebellion for 'plotting to destabilise the national government'. They are detained at Camp Vicente Lim in Laguna and have recently concluded a hunger strike as of the time of this writing.

Two days after Pinpin's arrest, on 30 April 2006, another cultural worker and peasant rights activist, Alexis Uy, was seized by military troops along with 14 farmers from the Kongreso ng Magbubukid para sa Repormang Agraryo (Peasant Congress for Agrarian Reform) in Quezon province while they were preparing for a Labour Day rally. A member of a local cultural organisation Artistang Pangkultura ng Mamalakaya sa Timog Katagalugan (APLAYA or Cultural Artists of Fisherfolks in Southern Tagalog), Uy was kept in isolated detention at the Philippine Army's Southern Luzon Command headquarters in Camp Nakar, Lucena City and later presented with the other detainees to the media as alleged NPA guerillas involved in a 'destabilisation plot'.

Uy was eventually released, but Pinpin and other cultural workers—such as sculptor, painter and community teacher Angie Bisuna Ipong—remain detained on charges of rebellion and murder. Ipong, a 62-year old peace advocate, was arrested on International Women's Day, 8 March 2005, in Misamis Occidental. She has been held incommunicado and subjected to torture, interrogation and sexual assault.⁴

The arrest of Pinpin and others shows that 'artists can not escape from the political contradictions of their time.'⁵ In a petition, the Amado Hernandez Resource Center (AVHRC), a cultural institution named after the late Filipino National Artist and trade unionist, called on the government to release Pinpin and Ipong: 'Our two cultural workers have fallen prey to political repression that victimises all those fighting for good governance, social reforms and the people's welfare'.⁶

On 22 August 2006, musician, film-maker and animator Theta Tulay, along with film-maker Bong de Leon and six other individuals of the award-winning progressive multimedia group Southern Tagalog Exposure were abducted while on a human rights fact-finding mission in Mulanay, Quezon province. The group was accosted by members of the Philippine Army's 74th Infantry Brigade while taking documentary photographs of the area. They were transferred to Camp Nakar and later released, although not without being threatened with similar charges of rebellion. Tulay's case exemplifies the experiences of activist film-makers who have experienced being directly harassed, assaulted and prevented from documenting human rights work by state or private security forces, thus being 'censored' even before finishing the production stage of their films.

On 13 September 2006, members of a community-based theatre group were arrested without a warrant and were detained by the military in Negros Occidental, an island in the western Visayas region. Members of Teatro Obrero (Workers' Theater), the cultural arm of the National Federation of Sugar Workers, were rehearsing for a performance commemorating the 20 September 1985 Escalante massacre of sugar workers⁷ when they were arrested. That same month, another organiser of Teatro Obrero was abducted along with six other individuals by the Philippine Army in Kabangkalan City, Negros Occidental, after their vehicle was accosted while passing through a military checkpoint along the road.

In Teatro Obrero's case, performances (usually an integration of dance, music, and drama) are utilised not only for 'aesthetic purposes, but also as a form of dialogue and statement [addressed] to fellow sugar workers and the hacienderos (sugar barons)'.⁸ Such harassment constitutes a deliberate attack against the intentions of the performance itself.

Progressive audio-visual groups have also been subjected to state-condoned harassment. Kodao Productions, a Manila-based film and community radio production group, was accused by a state witness of being a 'Communist propaganda unit' and had an award-winning mainstream radio program axed on the on the day that the President declared a state of national emergency in March 2006.⁹

Such forms of political harassment are tantamount to censorship as they intend to produce a 'chilling effect' or an atmosphere of intimidation on other cultural workers and citizens, who would otherwise be outraged at the impunity with which human rights violations are being committed by suspected state forces. Among media practitioners, the deaths of at least 46 Philippine journalists under the Arroyo administration have been deemed as the 'most brutal form of censorship'.¹⁰

Sins of omission: Systematic and legislated censorship

Many of the cases involving direct censorship involve the Movie, Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB), whose history as a censorial agency can be traced to the country's colonial and dictatorial past. Created by President Marcos by Presidential Decree in 1985, MTRCB is the Philippines' modern-day adaptation of the Board of Censors instituted by the post-war American colonial government. Its charter, as UP law professor Atty Victor Avecilla writes, is a 'verbatim reproduction' of the now-defunct Board of Review for Motion Pictures and Television (BRMPT) instituted under the Marcos regime.

MTRCB is essentially a censors' board whose majority is composed of Presidential appointees, who may rate and classify films and TV programmes into categories according to the age—and presumed maturity—of audiences. However, it retains the power to impose an 'X' rating on a work, thereby preventing it from public exhibition in the country.

MTRCB has been under fire from citizens for arbitrarily imposing 'X' ratings on works for mainstream audiences and even alternative films—such as Toxic Mango, a five-minute work by independent film-maker Khavn dela Cruz—for containing supposed salacious and immoral scenes.¹¹ The work was part of a project, Guimaras: Short films from the Oil Spill, by the Philippine Independent Filmmakers Cooperative, aiming to generate more public awareness of the massive October 2006 oil spill off the coast of Guimaras island in Western Visayas.

In October 2006, MTRCB came under fire from both the Philippine Senate and the House of Representatives for imposing an alleged arbitrary 'X' rating on a DVD film biography of deposed President Joseph Estrada. The rating was imposed after MTRCB reviewers declared that the work tended to 'threaten the political stability of the state' and 'undermine the faith and confidence of the people in the government', prompting Estrada to bring the case to court¹² and distribute the film via the Internet. Senators denounced MTRCB for acting as President Arroyo's 'censorship body' while Congress threatened to allot only an annual budget of 1 peso to the agency.

In August 2006, the MTRCB pressured producers of a local public affairs show on TV network ABC 5 to delete selected portions of the film Shadow, a documentary feature on the NPA and its "shadow" government existing in guerilla zones throughout the country.¹³

In light of the two aforementioned cases, it seems that MTRCB has wielded its censorial privilege against the perceived political opponents of the current administration. 'There is indeed a trend right now for the MTRCB to be used in preventing the spread of what the powers-that-be deem as counter-propaganda [to the Arroyo administration],' writes journalist and UP journalism professor Danilo Arao.¹⁴

While independent film-makers and cultural workers have initiated and supported the formation of spaces and events where their works may be accessed, such instances of censorship against works deemed to be 'immoral' or 'seditious' have usually occurred in the context of the work's dissemination to a much wider audience through the mass media—through television and radio, in particular. Such pressure on national and local media is more evident and pervasive, to the point that international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders gave the Arroyo administration a failing mark in upholding press freedom in its annual report, citing the high incidence of murders, assaults, arrests lawsuits and censorship against the Philippine press in 2006.¹⁵

In February 2007, the Philippine government approved legislation that may have even more adverse implications on censorial practices: the Anti-Terror Law or the Human Security Act (HSA), which will take effect on 14 July 2007. This bill has drawn flak and opposition from various sectors and human rights organisations, who view it as a tool to effect more political repression and surveillance against perceived opponents of the current administration. Its critics contend that the bill's ambiguous definitions of what constitutes terrorism may be used against artists, film-makers and musicians.

The Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP), an organisation of professional and semi-professional artists from different disciplines which is currently based in Metro Manila, has denounced the bill as 'anti-artist' and 'anti-arts and culture'.¹⁶ CAP said in a statement, 'The HSA defines "terrorists" and "terrorism" so vaguely that even an art or literary piece critical of the politically and economically powerful elite could be classified as "terrorism," and its creators, "terrorists"'.

The cultural implications of the HSA are even more adverse, CAP contends. 'For the above and its other equally ambiguous provisions, it is accurate to brand [it] as the ultimate censorship instrument. Already indirectly censored by patrons' or commercial interests and the clout of the conservative church hierarchy, this bill will all the more discourage artists to explore alternative ideas and liberating themes. For the people, this bill simply means subjugation, the most dreadful state of humanity,' it continued.

CAP views the HSA as an extension of the repression brought about by the global war against terror. 'People across the world have long disdained the [HSA's] mother template, the USA PATRIOT Act. It is this legislation—and the severe human rights violations it has spawned, like the abuses in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib—that has unmasked the true face of the Bush regime's so-called "War on Terrorism" following 9/11. The USA PATRIOT Act of which the HSA is a mere copycat is in fact a key reason why there is a ever-widening call worldwide to repudiate the Bush's bogus "War on Terrorism",' CAP Secretary General Soc Jose writes. ¹⁷

Culturing Self-censorship

Another aspect which has yet to be explored in depth is the degree of self-censorship arising from the material and socio-economic conditions faced by Philippine cultural workers.

Despite the rosy economic indicators that state technocrats point to as a proof of national growth, there remain compelling signs that the majority of the Filipino people remain in dire economic straits. A national survey institute, the Social Weather Stations, has reported that one out of five Filipinos goes hungry, while the government has drastically revised the definition of 'unemployment' to keep the unemployment statistics from soaring. Faced with such prospects, many cultural workers and communities have to contend primarily with commercialising their works or sticking to tried-and-tested formulas in order to survive. For young artists in the music industry, for instance, works must not be too politically or socially critical as they risk losing producers and sponsors, says Julie Po of CAP.

In an interview, Po asserts that state policies are also steering cultural workers toward a situation where artistic freedom, license and experimentation is intentionally or unintentionally suppressed due to economic considerations. This is evident in dwindling state budgets for service sectors (e.g. health, education and culture) and institutions such as the National Museum and Cultural Center of the Philippines, Po highlights, where a situation of economic exigency and dwindling state support for the cultural sector eventually transfers to private interest the control of public expression.

The influence of private corporate interests in media and in other service- and culture-related industries also has implications on censorship in the arts. In October 2006, independent film-maker Jan Philippe Carpio charged television network ABC 5 with censorship when it edited out portions of Carpio's short film Bunker O: Sumirib, which tackled the effects of a 2006 oil spill off the coast of Guimaras island by a MT Solar I tanker chartered by global oil giant Petron Corporation. The accident, which discharged around two million litres of bunker fuel into the Visayan sea, is reckoned to be one of the largest oil spills in Philippine history.

A six-minute version of the film was to be aired on ABC 5, along with other works on the Guimaras oil spill by 12 other film-makers. However, the station aired a four-minute version, where sequences containing the words 'Petron' and 'MT Solar' were edited out. The film-maker notes that these excluded sequences consisted mostly of interviews and quotes from local fishermen affected by the environmental tragedy, whose voices were literally cut short by the censor's cutter.

'Specific and key portions of the film involving the residents of Guimaras expressing their honest feelings about the oil company and the shipping company, who as we all know are involved in this tragedy, were clearly edited out, omitted [and] censored,' the film-maker asserted.¹⁸ The network later apologised to Carpio for the incident.¹⁹

Hence, the current economic and political situation—marked by the imposition and enforcement of policies which contradict many basic constitutional rights, the climate of impunity surrounding rights violations, the facade of democratic governance which the current administration has to maintain, and the economic exigencies involved in the production, distribution, and reception of cultural goods—produces a situation which can be internally immobilising in many aspects for artists. Cultural workers are faced with a situation where 'freedom' is bestowed for as long as one does not rock the boat too hard. The views of the status quo determine the exhibition of works, imposing a form of censorship that 'forcefully thwarts dissenting views'.²⁰ As Philippine National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbrera said in an interview, 'Under the present quasi-martial law condition, the parameters are not clear. In such a situation, the artist has theoretically the freedom to express himself but the parameters are not certain and therefore, it makes an artist apprehensive on how far he can go.'²¹

Interrogating the censors

The local struggle against such systematic erasures, however, continues through the formation of tactical alliances among cultural workers. More artists are uniting among their ranks to deliver their protests against censorship and political repression. Veteran artists who survived martial law (imposed in 1972) are relearning tactics of combat, while a new generation of cultural workers—many of whom were barely conceived when martial law was first imposed—are discovering how it is to interrogate the censors of a new regime.

A case in point is the initiation of project-based interventions, such as TutoK Karapatan art project (tutok, roughly translated, means 'to focus' or 'to aim', while karapatan means 'rights'), which has been generally supported by the artistic community. TutoK convenor and Filipina visual artist Karen Flores describes the project as a 'comprehensive artists' response to the growing unrest of the times', noting that the project has made possible several exhibitions at various sites in 2006, including a community museum and park, public spaces such as churches and markets, a gallery, an academic art space and a national cultural institution.

Formed in late 2005, as a response to what the participants described as the 'deteriorating' human rights situation in the country, TutoK eventually mustered the support of around 300 Filipino artists, Its opening salvo was a multimedia public arts festival organised by the Neo-Angono Artists Collective entitled Publikhaan: Making Human Rights Issues Public, held in Angono, Rizal in November 2006. This was followed by a travelling exhibition entitled Perspektiba (Perspective) through three universities: the University of Santo Tomas, University of the Philippines and St Scholastica's College. The works in Perspektiba reflect on the overtures of state violence: literal and metaphorical dislocations, disappearances and demises associated with the rising wave of political repression in the Philippines and more importantly, which attest to the growing discontent and clamour among the visual arts community against the assaults on human rights under the Arroyo administration.²² The intentional staging of the exhibitions in university art spaces is 'timely, considering the growing number of student activists who are either abducted or killed' and it 'further underscores the initiative's aim to bring these issues to a wider audience.'²³ Such exhibitions aim to infuse the urgency of rejecting the 'passive acceptance of repression'²⁴ and demonstrate the 'resistance [to repression] must be no less ubiquitous.'²⁵

A second TutoK-initiated exhibition at the Boston Gallery in Cubao, Quezon City, entitled Dos por Dos ('Two by Two'), featured over 200 mixed media works representing each artist's reflection on human rights issues and unified by a common format: a standard size of two feet by two feet. The images, which one critic described as 'mind-boggling in variety and impact', ranged from the 'winking (a mugshot portrait of President Joseph Estrada) to the jaw-dropping (President Macapagal-Arroyo fully gowned, surrounded by piles of skulls in what is apparently a killing field of political victims, and smiling to two skulls she holds up, like Hamlet soliloquising to poor Yorick)'.²⁶

Visual artist and writer Karen Ocampo Flores, also TutoK Karapatan's project director, writes of how 'numbers [in Dos Por Dos] play a vital function in both [the exhibit's] text and subtext', recalling how it literally denotes a 'piece of wood of such thickness and breadth, wieldy enough as a weapon or a deterrent in pinch'. 'The numerous artists who make up [the exhibit] wrest the violence implicit in that numeric phrase and turn numbers into a declaration of solidarity,' she declares.²⁷ TutoK's last major site-specific exhibition Re-View: Pasang Masid was held in February 2007, at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

More artists, musicians, film-makers and writers are also forming issue-based alliances among themselves, as seen in the examples of Artists for the Removal of Gloria Arroyo (ARREST Gloria), a broad alliance of artists calling for the ouster of Arroyo and the institutionalisation of reforms beyond a constitutional succession. The campaigns for the release of political prisoners such as the 'Tagaytay Five' continue, while Axel Pinpin manages to produce and publish poetry even under detention. Progressive artists organisations are also strengthening their ties with people at the grassroots level. CAP, for instance, organises fora, skills training workshops, and outreach programmes among disenfranchised and dispossessed urban and rural poor communities as a way of 'empowering the people to speak and create for themselves'.

In the Philippines, the struggle against censorship is a struggle against forgetting and collective amnesia. The coming years will prove to be the litmus test for a new generation of cultural workers besieged by such systematic erasures. LCI.

Yesterday's Roundup: Of Music and Mining

Gans and I attended a professorial lecture by Dr. Jonas Baes of the UP College of Music yesterday. Normally, I don't get to drop by similar events due to our respective schedules at Kalikasan, but this one was different. It was about the life and music of Jonas' elder brother, Dr. Aloysius "Ochie" Baes.

Ochie died last December. We knew him mostly as a scientist (AGHAM founding member!), an environmentalist, and a former member of the Bastes Commission on the Rapu-rapu mine spill. In his youth, Ochie was a former Chairperson of the UP Los Banos Student Council and a political detainee during Martial Law. It was only after he died that we learned that Ochie was also a musician, who helped compose many activist songs of the 1970's. Some of the recollections during Ochie's wake and tribute are documented in this article in Bulatlat.

The activity was held in one of the rooms at the College. The airconditioned space was bare, filled with monoblock chairs and a tarpaulin backdrop where sepia images of Ochie during his student days were projected onscreen. Indigenous musical instruments lay gathering dust inside large glass cabinets, like artifacts in a museum. One can hear the muffled sounds of instruments--stringed, percussion, and whatelse--echoing in the halls outside.

In this room, Jonas presented his lecture entitled "Generationloss: The Political Life of a Cassette Recorder and the Political Songs of Aloysius Baes Through the Early Years of Martial Law in the Philippines " (which hopefully shall be made available online and translated into Tagalog later on). In this paper, Jonas starts off by narrating the history of an object which many now dismiss as an artifact in this era of iPods and MP3 players, and but which was then considered as the cutting-edge in music technology in the rural Philippines of the 1970s: a cassette recorder. Jonas goes on to narrate the history of this recorder and the function of music in the Baes household and, eventually, in the political activities of his brothers in UP Los Banos and, later on, in the dictatorship's prisons. From these recollections, he proceeds to a lot of themes: the economics of cultural technology, the sociology of aesthetics, the politicization of the machine and its capacity for reproduction, the functions of memory and remembering.

Sure, there were welcome interruptions in this two-hour talk (In between segments of Jonas' lecture, Prof. Lester Demetillo rendered his version of Ochie's "top hits" Huwad na Kalayaan, Mutya, and Diwang Walang Takot. By the way, Jonas was lecturing while wearing only socks (his shoes were neatly set aside on the floor). I still can't figure out why.) But the main point of Jonas' lecture on Ochie's life was clear: about how music and its distribution could consciously be wielded as a form of potent political action, how it has the capacity to not just entertain and represent, but to resist and liberate.

It was a good and successful activity, that talk and the lively discussion that followed. Although an ample audience had filled up the room, I wish more people, especially activists involved in music production, could have been there to attend.

Ironically, for someone who just listened to a lecture which partly expounded on the power of technology as a means of memory, I forgot to take pictures and record the beautiful renditions of Ochie's songs.
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The Manila Times today published an article I wrote for their Special Report on mining in the Philippines. The story is an update on the Marcopper mine tragedy in Marinduque: what has happened (or not happened) so far in the pursuit for environmental justice for the affected communities. Also featured in three installments since Sunday was a piece on Defend Patrimony and how community groups have drafted a people's mining plan. Part two came out yesterday and part three today.

On the lighter side, Phil. Entertainment Portal featured our Sinekalikasan environmental film project yesterday in its indie section. The third screening's scheduled later at mag:net's Cinekatipunan, I hope everybody drops by to support the works by our CWTS students and Lomel/Miles/EJ. We will also be sponsoring a forum on climate change at UP later.
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Here's the lyrics of one of Ochie's songs. It was produced in prison during the early years of Martial Law. Rediscovering it thirty-two years later (I first heard the song at Ochie's wake), it struck me how the state of things that the song speaks of hasn't changed, no matter how much we sadly wish they did.

Stockade 4, Camp Crame, June 12, 1975

HUWAD NA KALAYAAN

May kalayaan ba kung bayan
Ay dumaraing sa hirap?

Kung kayamanan ay hawak ng dayuhan
At masa ay salat
Kung manggagawa ay dusta
At magsasaka ay inaapi
Huwad, sadyang huwad ang kalayaan
Kung ang bayan ay ganyan.

May kalayaan ba kung bayan
Ay may gapos sa kamay?
Kung ang katotohanan
At katarunga’y nilulupig
Laksang nagtatanggol
Ay pinarurusahan at inuusig
Huwad, sadyang huwad ang kalayaan
Kung ang bayan ay ganyan.

Gapos ay lagutin, kamao ay itaas
Tumindig ka?t kamtin ang kalayaan
Hirap ay lunasan, pang-aapi ay wakasan
Ang bayan ay ipaglaban

Ang bayan ay ipaglaban.

Birthing women artists

(Published in Issue No. 6 of Ctrl+P. To access the entire contents, please visit http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/17531_lzsdc/Ctrl_P_AnniversaryIssue6.pdf)

Birthing women artists:
Norma Liongoren and the Walong Filipina exhibition

For 17 years, the annual Walong Filipina (Eight Filipinas) exhibition of the Liongoren Gallery has collectively shown the works of close to a hundred women artists from the Philippines. Exhibiting the works of eight selected artists annually throughout different venues, the show pays "tribute to the creative contributions of women, who often have to juggle the multiple roles of wife, mother, and artist"¹.

Norma Liongoren, gallery owner and curator, asserts that the Walong Filipina show has literally and figuratively gone a long way since it was first held in March 1990 at the Cubao-based art space, a two-storey residential structure converted into a gallery.

"At the time, it was unheard of [in the Philippines]. Now there are more women artists. In a way, inaabangan ito ng mga tao (people look forward to it)," she says of the curatorial gamble. Nearly two decades later, the annual Walong Filipina exhibitions continue to gain acceptance in its attempts to reflect, interrogate, and recreate social realities from the perspective of Philippine women artists.

Periods of feminist interventions

Walong Filipina can arguably trace its ideological roots from the socio-political turmoil of the Martial Law and post-EDSA Philippines², which was characterized by the upsurge of women's organized and communal interventions in society. The early years of this era saw the births of collective feminist formations, such as MAKIBAKA (organized in 1972) and Gabriela, the largest umbrella organization of Filipino women's groups in 1984. The 1980s to 1990s were marked by more interventions in the spheres of cultural politics, such as the founding of Women Writers in Media Now, Concerned Artists of the Philippines Womens Desk, and the women artists group KASIBULAN (Kababaihan sa Sining at Bagong Sibol na Kamalayan). The contextual conditions of the times led to more women going out, getting involved, and getting together, whether in politics, media, or the arts.

The direct precursor of the Walong Filipina was a five-woman exhibition sponsored by the Liongoren Gallery shortly after the EDSA 1 popular uprising³. By that time, Liongoren Gallery was operating in its 5^th year as a commercial and artistic space. Sculptor Julie Lluch came up with the idea of holding an all-woman exhibit, prompting Liongoren to put up a show in March 1986.

This exhibit featured works from who Liongoren considered as "women artists of the hour": Lluch, the late Philippine Association of Printmakers founder Adiel Arevalo, book designer Edwina Koch-Arroyo, printmaker-ceramic artist Nelfa Querubin and sculptor-painter Virginia Ty-Navarro.

The show was a milestone of sorts for the gallery, as all-women exhibitions were generally unheard of in Manila during this period, Liongoren says in retrospect. There was only a sprinkling of active women artists in a predominantly-male art scene, in spite of the fact that women were instrumental to setting up institutions recognized as pivotal to the emergence and development of Philippine modern and contemporary art: Lyd Arguilla of the Philippine Art Gallery, Purita Kalaw Ledesma of the Art Association of the Philippines, and even former First Lady Imelda Marcos who "[endowed] 'culture and the arts' with both capital and infrastructure"⁴.

Before, male artists were used to having women as organizers [of art events], but seemed not as open once the latter's qualities as artists were emphasized, Liongoren opines. Such shows, she added, initially caused others to raise their brows in skepticism but eventually became more accepted in time. The idea and practice of an all-women show persisted.

The Liongoren Gallery's Walong Filipina exhibition officially began in 1990, the same year when KASIBULAN was organized by Imelda Cajipe-Endaya and others. For this debut show, Liongoren gathered eight women artists: Ida Bugayong, Cajipe-Endaya, Brenda Fajardo, Lydia Ingle, Veronica Lim-Yuyitung, Lluch, Nelfa Querubin and Arlene Villaver. The gallery, not surprisingly, was also a venue for some of KASIBULAN's meetings later on, Liongoren recalls.

The title Walong Filipina was arrived at out of sheer coincidence and symbolic significance.

"Why eight (8)? While I was listing down all the artists I wanted to feature, I stopped at the number 8. Later on, I rationalized [the choice] by noting that the number 8 has a closed form, forming an infinite loop. I wanted to emphasize that women were infinitely endowed with talent," Liongoren says.

This time, the public proved to be more receptive to the concept. "I tried to hold a Walong Filipina show every year after that. I'd feature a senior artist and a young woman artist, or bunso (literally translated from Tagalog as youngest child) who is new in the art scene," she says. Villaver was the 1990 show's bunso.

Liongoren realized the potentials and the power of the show, and decided to pursue it as an annual art event. "Artists are encouraged by the mere fact that you highlight their characters as women. They try to put their best foot forward," she says.

Celebrating Diversities and Affinities

Walong Filipina has held 15 shows to date since that first exhibit back in 1990. The gallery has generally sustained the annual all-women's show, except for a brief respite from 1996 to 1997 when the series was suspended for operational reasons⁵ and 2002, when Liongoren was preoccupied with organizing a separate art exhibit commemorating the EDSA 1 popular revolt⁶.

Since its debut in 1990, Walong Filipina has taken on an organic and dynamic character of its own, a state of flux and exploration. From its first show at the Liongoren Gallery along New York St. in Cubao, Walong Filipina has sojourned through various other locations throughout the Philippines as a travelling exhibition: ranging from commercial to academic spaces, from government to Catholic Church offices, galleries and museums⁷. Liongoren Gallery also operated a second branch at the commercial shopping center Megamall from October 1992 to 1996, adding to the list of venues. At times, the exhibit would be staged as simultaneous shows, or held in tandem with workshops or discussions.

Equally varied were the artistic media encompassed by the shows. Saying that she does not want art to "be pegged to the usual paintings", Liongoren has consciously attempted to display the diversity of media, modes and materials that Filipina artists have worked with. At the start, the exhibitions featured mostly traditional paintings and sculptures, but quickly widened its range to include non-traditional media such as installation and performance art, fiber art, clay art, advertising and graphic design, craft, cuisine, fashion, dance, music, theater, film, poetry, literature⁸, and even ceramics, miniatures and floral arrangements.

Rather than feature a single artists' group or a pre-defined barkada (clique, coterie or group of friends, when loosely translated from Tagalog), Walong Filipina generally assembles a loose set of individual women artists converging through incidental or defined thematic affinities, which are defined in the subtitles given to each Walong Filipina show.

The women in Walong Filipina are conceptually-unified through commonly-shared territories, identities and roles, or advocacies.

At least two Walong Filipina shows have grouped artists on the basis of shared geographies: Mga Anak ni Urduja (Urduja's Children, 1999), a travelling exhibit featuring women artists who trace their roots to Pangasinan province⁹, and Parangal Kay Tandang Sora (Tribute to Tandang Sora, 2003), featuring works by Filipina artists who have lived, grown up, settled, or are based in Quezon City¹⁰. Although the concept may have first originated from a curatorial assertion of regional affiliation (Liongoren hails from Dagupan, Pangasinan and is commercially based in Quezon City), the shows have been reframed as a tribute to the two heroines of Philippine pre-colonial mythology and historical armed resistance to Spanish colonization, respectively.

However, shared geographies among women artists may not always be literal. In Parangal Kay Tandang Sora, the common location (Quezon City) is merely a transit point for women artists of vastly-differentiated interests and leanings. These may also pertain to shared arenas of interest or inclinations, such as the time when Liongoren chose to feature visual and written works by writer-artists, during the first Walong Filipina show held at Megamall (a major shopping center along EDSA) in 1993¹¹.

Conversely, other Walong Filipina shows chose to celebrate professional diversity: the 2006 selection, for instance, featured a selection of visual artists who were practitioners from various fields: dance, music, advertising, photography and film¹². (For details of this exhibition, please see Lisa Ito's essay, Ctrl+P issue 1: www.trauma-interrupted.org/ctrlp/issue1.pdf )

Curatorial selection of participating artists is mostly done by Liongoren, in consultation with other women artists. As the shows went on, Liongoren occasionally "recycled" several artists, although always in the context of a new exhibiting group. Another unintentional aspect of the Walong Filipina series was its featuring of mother and daughter artists, albeit in separate shows: Julie Lluch and Krista, Aba and Sari Lluch-Dalena, Cristina and Maria Taniguchi, for instance.

Thematics and transits

Many of Walong Filipina's offerings and themes have been premised on shared advocacies and conceptual interrogations: patriotism and nationalism in contemporary practice, ecological and environmental struggles, questions of authorship and gender, and the delineation of personal and collective identities, for instance.

The ecological thematic was first explored in the sixth Walong Filipina show in 1995, which featured applications of clay and fiber art by women artists, who created works from volcanic ash, pina cloth, twigs, earthenware, tinalak and tie-dyed textiles and other indigenous materials. A few years earlier in 1991, Mt. Pinatubo in Central Luzon erupted, leaving in its wake a massive amount of debris that people from various professions have sought to utilize as an alternative material, Walong Filipina's artists included.

The use of native materials and concern for the environment has been a recurrent theme of many Walong Filipina shows afterwards, particularly in the 2000, and 2001 exhibitions. This may be partially attributed to society's responses to increasing environmental issues and to the strategic timing of the exhibitions: March 8 (International Women's Day) and Women's Month comes right before April 22, when Earth Day is observed worldwide and in the Philippines by environmental groups.

A more direct articulation of environmental awareness and advocacy was evident in the 2000 and 2001 shows, entitled Sa Ngalan ng Kalikasan I at II (In the Name of Nature I and II), respectively. The first exhibit revolved around the philosophical theme of nature as a site of rebirth, regeneration and destruction. The second show, composed mostly of KASIBULAN members, revolved around the theme of nature and nurturing. Incidentally, many natural disasters and tragedies occurred during this period when Walong Filipina chose to take on the environment as a priority cause: the Payatas landfill landslide tragedy in 1999, landslides and flash floods due to strong rains, and the furor over the Visiting Forces Agreement and toxic wastes left in US naval bases in Subic and Clark.

Another thematic arena explored by Walong Filipina was the process of imagining self and nation. The 2004 travelling exhibit with the subtitle Ang Paglalahad ng Walong Filipina (Revelations by Eight Filipinas), showcased two works from each of the eight featured artists¹³, representing who they were and what they wanted to be. The show, writes art critic Alice Guillermo, "[hints] at revelatory self-referential narratives" and "a reckoning with what constitutes one's deepest self or how one defines oneself as a woman and as a human being"¹⁴.

But the artists of Walong Filipina were not always women, exclusively. In 1998, the year of the Centennial of the 1898 Philippine Revolution, the gallery commissioned eight male artists to pay tribute to eight Filipina revolutionaries¹⁵ during the period of dissent against Spanish colonial rule. The eight participating Filipino artists were allowed to choose and portray from the book Women in the Philippine Revolution (edited by Rafaelita Hilario Soriano) eight Katipuneras (women members of the Katipunan, the lead revolutionary organization founded and led by Andres Bonifacio) who would represent the first eight provinces that revolted against the Spanish rule over the Philippine islands.

Liongoren Gallery also celebrated the Centennial of the Philippine Feminist Movement in 2005 through a back-to-back solo exhibition of Imelda Cajipe-Endaya's works entitled Conversations on Juan Luna and the Walong Filipina exhibit. Norma Liongoren infused a collaborative element to the two exhibitions by framing the Walong Filipina show as a response to or "conversation" with Cajipe-Endaya's collages, which were composed of old silk-screened images of Juan Luna's Spolarium representing each of the eight featured artists¹⁶ in turn. This process of reaction, appropriation and dialogue unifies the lives and works of the nine women artists, threading them together and subverting traditional notions of authorship.

For this year, the Walong Filipina 2007 show straddles traditional dividing distinctions between classes and crafts, by including in one exhibition the works of women artists and artisans alike. Subtitled Daragang Magayon ('Beautiful Maiden', in the Bicol¹⁷ dialect), the exhibit features works from Bicol-based women artists: three "fine arts" artists—Lina Llaguno Ciani, Tosha Albor and Raquel Almonte and four craftswomen: handloom weavers Socorro Napa and Benita Tucay and craftswomen and typhoon Reming¹⁸ (International codename: Xangsane) survivors Mercoria Basas, Eustaquia Barce and Marissa Mendoza.

Also interesting is Liongoren's appropriation of the term bunso, to signify the "new" or "youngest" artist of each batch. Bunso as a local term of endearment does not exclusively refer to familial or blood relations but connotes informal cultural and social formations as well. The term's usage implies the creation of a community: not a competitive and strictly hierarchical one, but a cooperative and communal gathering of sisters.

Lastly, most of the shows function as tributes to historical figures or individual women artists, such as the 2005 show, which paid homage to Paz Paterno, the first Filipina painter to be given historical recognition and to the late contemporary artist Pacita Abad, known for her tapestries. The 1993 show was dedicated to the late Dolores Feria, who was Liongoren's professor in Western Thought (as the subject was then called) at the University of the Philippines. Liongoren later on found out that Feria painted in addition to writing and teaching. In at least one case, Walong Filipina is dedicated to women as a whole sector: Sa Ngalan ng Kalikasan II, was a tribute to all women who collectively engaged in the EDSA 2 popular uprising, which overthrew the administration of Joseph Estrada, now on trial for alleged anomalies, including unexplained wealth resulting from illegal gambling (jueteng).kickbacks. This year's Walong Filipina is a tribute to the survivors of Typhoon Reming, where part of the show's proceeds of show will go to a fund for art-based rehabilitation work led by the House of Comfort Art Network, Inc. (ARTHOC).

This practice of parangal or paying tribute also sets the Walong Filipina exhibits apart from other shows, as it indicates a continuity of purpose: the word connotes both gratitude and a bestowment of honor towards the subject, and, more importantly, allegiance to a shared cause.

A 'Midwife of Ideas'

The story of Walong Filipina, moreover, is a testimony to Norma Liongoren's unique though low-profile sojourn as a self-taught curator. In the Philippines, the role of curator remains a largely loose one which is often shared by artists, critics, writers, teachers, and even gallery owners out of contingency.

Liongoren's story of how she came to be is best appreciated in the context of the informal character of curatorship in the Philippine setting and in relation to her other gendered roles. As curator of the Walong Filipina show, Liongoren engages in a multitude of tasks: conceptualizing, mobilizing and motivating, contacting the artists, meeting deadlines, scouting for venues, negotiating, socializing, inviting, entertaining guests, communicating, educating, networking, promoting, delegating tasks, cooking, overseeing administrative work, supervising the set-up, even finding appropriate clothes and standing in for absent artists during photo shoots. In between these, she attends to her other duties as gallery proprietor, art dealer, wife, and mother.

"I'm an organizer, people-oriented by nature. Along the way, there are people who gravitate towards you," she says, "I get involved in their lives. I try to get them all together in a meeting, try to mobilize them, get them to contribute. They get excited." This degree of influence enables her to engage in a dialogue with others, to be a "midwife of ideas" as Liongoren terms it.

Thirty years ago, being a "midwife of ideas" was the farthest thing that Liongoren, a trained-but-no-longer practicing nurse and field worker immersed in population research, had in mind. Events, however, steered her towards the visual arts, leading her to engage in it full-time. Liongoren founded the gallery in March 1981 after marrying the renowned abstractionist Alfredo Liongoren. Her foray into art dealership, she says, was an unexpected consequence of being a painter's wife, as she would often deliver her husband's works to clients and would be asked by his fellow painters if she could bring their works along. Although Liongoren nursed a fervent interest in the arts "as a spectator", it was her family and professional background (business, medical services, and work with non-government organizations) which unwittingly prepared her for the tasks of selling works of art.

Liongoren eventually took on the role of curating most of the gallery's exhibitions, conceptualizing her own shows in the process, the longest-running of which are the Walong Filipina exhibitions.

"[The shows] go with my current involvements. It's me. It emanates from my advocacies and concerns,"¹⁹ she says. This is perhaps the reason why Walong Filipina's themes are reflective of personal passions and advocacies which Liongoren has carefully cultivated through the years: feminism and gender studies, patriotism, social justice, and environmental struggles.

She, however, remains self-effacing when it comes to her role and process as a curator. "I'm not a trained curator, I just learn along the way," she says, describing her process as oido (Spanish for "by the ear", e.g. having an ear for music, or moving as one goes along) and going by instinct.

But what accurate instinct it is. Whether Liongoren eventually acknowledges it or not, Walong Filipina has, for the past seventeen years under her care, proved to be a formidable contributor to the pursuit of the feminist discourse in Philippine contemporary art. For birthing more than a hundred women artists in the last twenty years, Liongoren has proved herself as one of the more capable midwives on this side of the artistic archipelago. ###
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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. ###