ILLUSTRATION AND STORY CHILDREN'S BOOK

Cinemalaya Independent Films National Tour promotions visited Gensan for a leg of film showings at the following venues: HTC-coordinated by this author, RMMC by Joanna Banting & Bing Carino, and NDDU by Marites Esteva sponsored locally by GSC Office of the City Mayor and CEMCEDO

The HTC coordinator with one of the film directors and the staff under the College of Humanities & Social Sciences

The film viewing was held at the HTC EMC audio-visual Room

Open Forum after every fim viewing engaged by the students coming from Polytechnic, RMMC, MSU and other guests

MINDANAO VISUAL ARTS CARAVAN 2007-SUNGDU-AN 4 NCCA

The Socsargen leg of the Mindanao Visual Arts Caravan for the Sungdu-an 4 Flagship Project of the NCCA Committee on Visual Arts coordinated by Al-Nezzar Ali, Head CVA Socsargen Area and held at HTC Rooftop co sponsored by the Kalimudan Culture and Arts Centre and Holy Trinity College of General Santos City

With the "Sambolayang Art works on the foreground, students from HTC, RMMC, MSU and NDDU looked on intently to the lecture about arts. The programme was co-sponsored by the College of Humanities and Sciences with Dean Priscilla Marayag giving the opening message.

HTC visual artists
HTC and NDDU student artists with the local visual artists of Gensan. This programme gathered the visual artists from Sarangani, Gensan, and South Cotabato except Koronadal. If I was not mistaken, this was the first time the local visual artists of the area was gathered in full force.

‘Sungdu-an 4,’ national art exhibit, opens in Mindanao
By Mozart Pastrano
Inquirer
First Posted 02:48:00 08/13/2007

Filed Under: Culture (general), Arts (general), Lifestyle & Leisure

MANILA, Philippines -- “Sungdu-an 4: Extensions,” the national visual arts exhibit, will open at the Museum of Three Cultures at Capitol University in Cagayan de Oro City on Aug. 17.

A flagship project of the National Committee on Visual Arts (NCVA) of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), the exhibit showcases 12 individual and collective works, three each from Mindanao, Visayas, Luzon, and the National Capital Region (NCR).

“Derived from the Waray word for convergence, the Sungdu-an scheme strives to track the emergent tendencies in Philippine art, regardless how fragmentary and discrepant these may be,” said project director Patrick D. Flores, art curator of the National Museum.

The operative term for this year’s Sungdu-an—“ExTensions”—signifies a movement beyond the local but at the same time remains sensitive to the conflicts and contradictions (the productive unease) in this engagement, in the process of extending or being extensive or seeking extensions.

The exhibit curators—Kelly Ramos-Palaganas (for Mindanao), Radel Paredes (the Visayas), Wire Rommel Tuazon (Luzon), and Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez (NCR), in tandem with NCVA chair Christopher Rollo—chose three kinds of work for each of their regions: existing works, new work, and site-specific projects.

The intuition of maternality in Pamela Yan’s work is ingrained in the entire structure—the furniture—of the household. Rene de Guzman’s procession of migrants haunts us as it transfigures into an army of toiling terracotta warriors.

The church is subjected to a consuming re-reading in the bleeding hands of Nomar Miano, who lays bare the mythology of catechetical truth. And, as if to confound expectations, Edwin Jumalon’s whimsy of color and stroke converses with his son Winner’s intense violation of the canvas with a different energy and spectrum.

Bembol dela Cruz measures the rationality of progress and drafts the cartography of catastrophe, reminding us of Immanuel Kant who has said: “From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Rowena Seloterio’s obsession with the vista of her mind reveals an idiosyncratic subjectivity that is exacting.

For his part, Paulo Martinez captures sound as the index of a whirling urban universe. And in an art historical redemptive program, women artists in Mindanao put up a wall of their present legacy, eclipsed through the seasons by the prejudice of gender.

For site-specific works, art that is created at the site of the exhibition, artists dwell on locus. In Marina Cruz’s experience, the self is composed of body parts that may fall out of joint and cohere again in a state of play, constantly reconstructed by social performances. Pilipinas Street Plan and Wesley Rasines present at once a glimpse and a panorama of how the technologies of painting and video, the media of graffiti painting and tattoo merge. And, conjuring an image of an odyssey, the Mindanao Art Caravan, steered by a multitude of artists from the region, harvests the “culture” of a locale in the very possibility of travel, a peregrinate instinct that finally arrives.

The exhibit opens with a cocktails reception at 5 p.m. on Aug. 17 at Capitol University’s Museum of Three Cultures in Cagayan de Oro City, where it will be on view until Sept. 18.

A Curators’ Forum unfolds at 2 p.m. on Aug. 17 at the AVR 2, 2/F University Library Building of Capitol University.

ART EXHIBITIONS and ARTICLES

PEACE INITIATIVES and LINKAGES

HTC main peace partner in Gensan for peace initiatives is the Kalimudan Culture and Arts Centre where this author sits as Vice President. The partnership started since 2003 for the 2nd Gensan Kalilangan Theater Festival

ACT FOR PEACE PROGRAMME our main sponsor

The first peace project where HTC became part with its sponsoring the venue for the first leg of theater production mount of the now national sensation "Dula Ta" at the HTC Rooftop

This author had a chance to direct the concert for peace of ARNEL PINEDA Journey fame in the 2009 'Panaghoy sa Kalinaw' at the KCC Convention Center, Gensan with local bands & Duncan Ramos

'Dula Ta' premiered at HTC Rooftop in 2006 and became a national and international sensation with shows all over the country and in Cyprus, Greece, and Jerusalem

The scenes of the powerful play that shed a thousand tears performed by the MSU Kabpapagariya and directed and written by Romeo Narvaez