Our coral reef-themed exhibition is a deep dive into the core of what it’s like being a Filipino
At the Mangrove Café, for which a new generation of chefs has curated a Filipino menu for the visitors of the Philippine Pavilion at the ongoing World Expo 2020 in Dubai, I asked a young Filipino waiter, “So how do you find our pavilion?”
Balancing a tray of three glasses of halo-halo on the palm of her hand, she squinted and said, “Medyo complicated and, uhm, pa-deep.”
I agree, but I countered, “That’s because the theme is ‘coral reef.’”
The conceptual theme, as expressed in the exhibition title Bangkóta or “coral reef” in old Tagalog, one of the Philippines’ more than 175 languages, is neither simple nor simplistic. It’s a deep dive into the core of what it’s like being a Filipino.
The pavilion opens up onto a plaza, a nod to the center of the design of every town under our long colonial experience, both Spanish and American. At the entrance, however, is an anito named Haliya. This moon goddess from Philippine precolonial mythology typically comes in the form of a pregnant female. At our pavilion, she comes as a sculpture by Duddley Diaz, about six meters high and painted in the color of the sea when it reflects the bright, clear sky. I like the choice of color not so much because it represents the blue of our tropical beaches, but because, as a modern touch, it pops like Keith Haring’s Barking Dog Blue.
The Philippine Pavilion, curated by Marian Pastor Roces and brought to form by architect Royal L. Pineda, is organically shaped like the coral reefs, evocative of openness, permeability, and connectivity. The structure, like reefs, appears to move beneath the waters on which our 7,641 islands float, the waters that at once divide and connect us not only to each other, but also to the larger world.
It is also suggestive of the oceans and seas by which—as historical accounts that go as far back as the ninth century show—we have had constant interactions with Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and Arab traders since hundreds of years before the Magellan expedition claimed to have discovered us in 1521.
We’re too ancient to have been a 16th-century discovery.
Philippine history goes all the way back to who knows when? In 2019, according to the New York Times, scientists confirmed evidence culled from further diggings at Callao Cave in Cagayan, where they first excavated ancient human remains in 2007, that an extinct small-bodied human species, a hominin they called Homo luzonensis, lived at least 50,000 years ago on what is now the island of Luzon. In an excavation the year before in a different cave in northern Philippines, scientists also discovered stone tools dating back 700,000 years.
In the newsletter published by the organizing committee behind our pavilion, it is said that “Neolithic Austronesians, who arrived in Batanes 4,000 years ago, blended with peoples who have been in the Philippines for 65,000 years.” From these new settlers, we developed all of our many Filipino tongues, as these Austronesian-speaking peoples moved “from Batanes to the whole of the Philippines, eastward to Indonesia and Polynesia, and westward to Madagascar.”
How ancient are we! We are more ancient than Jose Rizal imagined when, having found the Pigafetta chronicles in their Italian original at the British Museum in London, he made an urgent call to Marcelo del Pilar in Madrid to have them translated to Filipino so “that it may be known how we were before 1521.”
We’re too ancient to have been a 16th-century discovery.
And so, backed by the 500th anniversary of the circumnavigation of the planet last year, I believe the direction Roces and Pineda have taken for the Philippine Pavilion is a throwback most necessary.
As welcoming as Haliya is a musical composition, enchanting and enigmatic, familiar yet otherworldly, by national artist for music Dr. Ramon Santos. Through percussion and wind instruments, it harks back to pre-Hispanic times, replete with soaring vocals that fill the pavilion with indigenous yet contemporary nuances and textures.
The musical suite accompanies the visitor through every expression in the exposition that’s created to reveal a facet of Filipino identity, from Dan Raralio’s Mystiquecross, a whimsical sculpture described as suspended “between the primordial and the yet-to-come,” to sculptor Lee Paje’s Roots of the Universe, an upside down forest reminiscent of pop-up children’s books, featuring mesmerizing photographs of Philippine marine life by Scott Tuason and bird life by Ivan Sarenas.
Just as mesmerizing is sculptor Patrick Cabral’s Vessel of Time, an intricate watercraft that represents the arrival of the Neolithic Austronesians 4,000 years ago. Projected on its sail are impressions of their oceanic journey, which mirrors today’s diaspora, especially of our seafarers.
Artist-couple Baby and Coco Anne’s Helix is a sculpture in gold, representative in its spiraling shape of the genetic make of our people, an abstract record of incremental arrivals from Asia and Africa and Austronesia over thousands of years and their mixing and mingling in what would be known as the Philippines. Its color, on the other hand, is representative of the primary metal of our country formed, as scientists claim, in supernovae and neutron star collisions that occurred before our solar system settled into orbit.
Like Helix, the theme of Our Gift to the World, produced by BBDO Guerrero, choreographed by Denisa Reyes and JM Cabling to music by Teresa Barrozo, and directed by Jae Hyung Wang, is a study of the Filipino “as medium between myriad cultures.”
Many other artworks at the Philippine Pavilion attempt to peel back the many layers of identity that sometimes get us confused as to where we have been, where we are now, and where we are headed as a people, such as Dexter Fernandez’s Super Past Time, a mural patching together motifs of Filipino pop culture.
Three other sculptures play around the idea of flight, denoting possible peaks in our evolution. Riel Jaramillo’s Limokon and Timamanukin are birdmen mythically bridging our past with our present. Charlie Co’s Soaring High is a representation of the Overseas Filipino Workers in the form of flying men and women. Toym Imao’s Confluence of Wings, like “archaic birds flying to the future,” is an ode to the Filipino in transit and a prayer for the Filipino to soar high above this changing world.
If the point of a World Expo is to get nations together in finding solutions to the pressing challenges of our time, the Philippine Pavilion, a little more self-centered than most of the other national pavilions I got to visit, is a return to a basic principle: For one to know others in this ailing world enough to help them, one must first know oneself.
In Latin, it is a universal rule: Nemo dat quod non habet, you cannot give what you do not have.
The World Expo 2020, which opened in Oct. 1, 2021 in Dubai in the UAE, runs only until the end of March.