Living on Loring: the Complete Album March 20, 2008

All photos from the Living on Loring project can now be accessed here.

The Wildcats’ Photographs
Images by the Wildcats
Text by Romina A. Diaz

Teaching photography was like teaching them to open another window.

Giving them a camera, they became observers to their realities and extracted themselves from what they were accustomed to. Through photography I was welcomed into their lives with a glimpse into the beauty that exists in the dilapidated walls that construct their settlements much different from my own.

Now I not only know them through pictures, but through actual experience, because they have invited me into their lives with pride.

The Living on Loring Photography Workshop
Images and text by Romina A. Diaz

For ten weeks, with help from my friends Anabel Bosch, Dang Bagas, Ginny Mata, and Hannah Liongoren, we taught photography, art, writing and creative installation to twelve young girls who lived on my street.

Outside my steel gate they played, and gathered, although it was something I had seen all my life. After living abroad for four years without coming home, the way I saw things had changed. My eyes had changed.

Silvana Diaz , Angel Velasco Shaw, and Ann Wizer presented me with a concept that dealt with women in my area in which we were to produce art. It would be the kind of art that could break down walls and barriers. I myself had all these walls and so did the girls whose workshop I set out to facilitate, but we found out art, friendship, creating and interaction breaks down walls faster then I have ever imagined.

I thought they would learn from me, but at the end of it all, it was I who learned so much.

Bunched Up in Boxes
Images by Romina A. Diaz
Text by Ginny Mata

Romina A. Diaz explains her installation, “Bunched Up in Boxes”:

These are the children that live on my street. They are my friends and companions and hopefully I am theirs. I know that I cannot save them from their reality, but I know that I can try to make it a little more beautiful than what it is. All it takes is a little time and a little heart.

In the Philippines, a country that boasts of having the third largest mall in the world, millions of informal settlers, living well below the poverty line, populate its cities’ streets.

Entire communities live in cramped one-room shanties made out of discarded materials like corrugated tin, used tarpaulins, and packaging boxes, without access to clean water and legal electricity. On any given street, these shanties often number in the hundreds, even thousands. They are called squatters, or in the vernacular, skwating, because their ‘houses’ illegally squat on land that is not theirs. Frequently, the government deems it necessary to “relocate” them: they are forced to leave, their houses are burned down, and they are moved to the outskirts of another city, where this vicious cycle begins again.

Others who are even more destitute have to make do with karitons (rolling wooden carts), which they move from one location to another, seeking shelter from the elements, and scavenging for food.

This is the kind of nomadic, transient life that the poorest of the poor live there. Relegated to the margins of society, it is hard enough for them to survive, let alone think about the future. Without sustainable educational opportunities available to them, their children are often doomed to suffer the same fate as their parents and their grandparents.

Living on Loring on All Our Nameable Days March 20, 2008

by Marne Kilates

The original link with photos of the Living on Loring launch can be found here.

Last posting, about a serendipitous find in the Net of pictures by Maxim Popykin that reminded me of a trip to Russia twelve years ago, we also featured here the announcement for the art exhibit and event “Living on Loring.” Galleria Duemila is uniquely—or even typically—located. Just about next door to this patch of gentility and haven for the arts is a “huddled mass of shanties,” as Romina Diaz describes them. She is the photographer daughter of Silvana (nee Ancelloti) and Ramon Diaz who own the gallery. And she is the level-headed, socially-aware fine arts student who shuttles between Italy and Manila, who apparently cannot ignore the face of loneliness and squalor living nearby.

Around the old genteel enclave of Loring (where the residences of Manila’s old rich were located more or less before or just after the last War and until Edsa Extension cut through the area to connect to Roxas Boulevard), is the unignorable din of the city: the MRT commuter train station on the intersection of Taft Avenue and Edsa, and their obstreperous traffic—of vehicles, commuters, and God knows whatever else. Romina and siblings grew up among these, and she and the children of the other end of Loring Street would inevitably cross paths.

It is perhaps emblematic that Romina is called Ate (Big Sister) by the neighborhood girls, that she used to be walked by them to her bus stop or fetched by them at night during earlier school days. And that on the first night we got acquainted with her mother, on Lina Llaguno Ciani’s opening (the previous exhibit which ended February 29), as we lingered for last beers, they had to be excused because one of the kids of the neighborhood had got bitten by a dog and they had to take him to the hospital. And the days before as I prepared for a poetry reading for Lina’s show, I witnessed one of the sessions of the intensive photography workshop Romina conducted for the “Wild Cat” girls of Loring.

Thus “Living on Loring, Art for Social Change” came about. The photographic installations by the Wild Cat Girls of Loring Street, composed mainly of their photographs and portraits of the shanty life, were assembled together with LBC cartons and Balikbyan boxes. They also wrote journals and letters to their loved ones, or simply expressed their innermost thoughts on paper, all of which became their painted declarations on one part of the surrounding walls of the compound.

And to put the whole thing together, Romina joined hands with other artists, notably her collaborator Ann Wizer and curator Angel Velasco Shaw, the cross-cultural artist, writer, and activist. Velaco Shaw’s bigger project, “Trade Routes: Converging Cultures–Southeast Asia and Asia America,” had made “Living on Loring / Who’s Sita?” its kick-off venue, at the start of the International Women’s Month.

On hand to attend the affair, apart from most of the children of the neighborhood, were numerous artist friends of the Gallery, among them fellow Bikolanos, the abstract master Gus Albor, social-realist/expressionist Dante Perez, Maya Muñoz, film director Butch Perez (who I was surprised to find was a reader of this blog), and the great Tiny Nuyda, my idol since I’ve been following Filipino art, whom I met for the first time, and publisher Karina Bolasco, and social worker Hope Abella. Hope marveled at the “lightness” of the affair while taking on such serious issues as women and teenage problems, the ramifications of poverty on the young who, it seemed, found some relief, a possible way out, by means of self-expression. And this time it was through the art of photography that Romina shared with them, which in the end helped them confront themselves, and not least, their surroundings.

Romina Diaz

Myself, who’s back into the starving artist mode, freelancing after exiting from the comfort zone of a day job, was simply amazed at the whole thing—this seemingly impossible cohesion or collision between the realm of art, its patrons and consumers (the comparably rarefied), and the realm of the improvised box of discarded wood and galvanized iron and hard things, and the so called public art sprouting in between. It was both edifying and discomfiting, as I remarked to my companions half facetiosusly, that it felt guilty to be bringing a full wine glass into the territory of the fish ball. Eventually, when I asked for a refill at the bar inside the compound, I was relieved to be given a cup of Styrofoam.

“Living on Loring” opened on March 8 and runs for the whole month. It was a “wild,” exuberant carnival afternoon, a street party of deep-fried fish balls, corn-on-the-cob, banana cue, ice cream, poetry reading by Romina’s friends, the group Romancing Venus, composed of my friends Ginny Mata (host), Anabel Bosch, Kooky Tuason and Karen Kunawicz. There was a series storytelling by various groups that was evidently enjoyed by the kids, the last being hosted by Kuya Bodjie (Pascua) of Batibot fame, and of course music by Bahaghari Kalidrum and other performers.

March 14, 2008

Living on Loring Slideshow March 9, 2008

Photos by Romina A. Diaz and the Wildcats.
Slideshow by Romina A. Diaz, edited by Angel Velasco Shaw.
The song, “War”, was written by Romina A. Diaz and Anabel Bosch, and sung by Anabel Bosch.