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MANILA, Philippines – Growing up, Romina Margherita Regina Ancellotti Diaz knew that Loring Street in Pasay was home. Her family’s house was there, No. 210, as well as her family’s Galleria Duemila.Loring Street, a paint splatter’s distance from Taft Avenue, was also home to an impoverished area. Down the street, Romina would often see little girls, “huddled as a group: five- to eight-year-old children playing outside our gate. The driveway of our house was their own little playground. Perhaps it was where they designed their own worlds of make-believe.” She considered the girls her first friends.
Encouraged by her artist parents, Ramon Diaz and Silvana Ancellotti-Diaz, the half-Italian Romina had a childhood full of colors even as she learned to create on her own. “My childhood was the most wonderful memory I have,” the 26-year-old Romina says. “Until now I remember watching the Saturday Group paint.”
She first left Loring when she went abroad to study at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, Italy. “The last things I saw as I left my childhood home were these girls waving goodbye,” she recalls. “I brought that memory with me.”
Upon returning home, she was met by a surprise. “I found my former playmates with children of their own—malnourished, married, and living the kind of lives their parents and grandparents had lived before them. And the little girls I’d last seen when I left years ago were now in their teens.”
That’s what gave her the idea of getting to know more about them. The idea has since grown into a remarkable art project called “Living on Loring,” which Romina describes as “an educational art project wherein they would discover each other’s humanity and be able to display it as art.”
The art project began with Romina, a bunch of girls and several cameras. There were 12 girls from Loring: Bhe-Bhe, Bhing-Bhing, Marilyn, Butak, Laarni, Joan, Wendryl, Amythel, Joy-Joy, Kim-Kim, Jessa and Ging-Ging. They called themselves the Wild Cats, after their favorite basketball team from the Disney movie “High School Musical.” The cameras were from Romina’s friends who had moved on to digital cameras. “I taught them the basics of photography and asked them to take pictures of their immediate environment and of the people in their community. In doing so, I was able to see their world through their eyes.”
Beyond the photographs, Romina also asked them to build their dream houses. She asked LBC for balikbayan boxes, and the company generously donated 150 boxes. Each girl painted and crafted her dream home from the ubiquitous balikbayan box, the Filipino icon reinvented by Filipinos. Aside from Romina’s ten-week photography workshop, the Wild Cats were also given a creative writing workshop courtesy of writers Dang Bagas, Anabel Bosch and Ginny Mata. Romina’s friend PJ Castro of Kameraworld donated the film and covered developing costs, with other sponsors pitching in as well. The biggest donor to the project was Romina’s mother, Silvana.
Romina’s installations, such as the babes-in-boxes artwork, the Wild Cats’ work and those of American installation artist Ann Wizer soon came together as “Living on Loring,” an art exhibit curated by Angel Velasco Shaw that ran at Galleria Duemila from March 8 to April 25. “I think it was a mixture of provocation, reality, identification and fantasy, depending on the social hierarchy each individual found himself in,” Romina says, describing the response to the show. “The exhibit was a perfect conversation of both our lives finding common ground despite the differences. I cannot find a better way of presenting what I believe art is, than through this project.”
She describes working with the girls as “truly a wonderful experience. It was different from painting on a canvas or sculpturing; I was working with the human emotions and dreams of individual girls, like a color that breathed and had a soul of its own. Treating each of them like fragile blown glass. It was really art with a life of its own.”
She also sees a definite change in the girls themselves, who were amazed at the response during the opening. Romina saw a growing confidence in them. “Despite all this, they will dream, and find ways to achieve what they envision ahead of them,” she says. “Hopefully more people would volunteer to push these girls into making their hopes a possible reality.”
Additionally, she is now putting up the framework of an offshoot book with Anvil Publishing. “We will write about our personal experiences from the show. The body of work is to be accompanied by the photographs that the girls and I took,” Romina says. “We are hoping to get it finished by this year or next.”
Romina says that half of “Living on Loring” is a “migrant show,” since the installation called “The Loring Huts,” composed of the boxes and images from the Wild Cats, is collapsible and, she hopes, can be exhibited to Filipinos abroad. She is preparing a life-sized version of her “Bunched Up in Boxes” installation to complement a forthcoming presentation by her older brother, entrepreneur Illac Diaz, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
In addition to that, Romina, who is fluent in Italian, will be returning to Italy in August to complete her degree in Fine Arts and Decorations, as “Living on Loring” is actually part of her experimental thesis. “I am planning to either take my masters in art education and art therapy or perhaps work for an arts institution in London which promotes art education and social responsibility,” she explains.
While in school, Romina stays in Florence, where she savors the cultural diversity and the lively discussions. She often camps out with friends on a moment’s whim. “For spontaneity’s sake we pack our bags and head off to some European city we have never been to before.”
In the meantime, she’s spending summer in the Philippines. “I love the people here; their smiles are the most powerful image I carry with me everywhere I go,” she says. Romina treasures the beaches and, in fact, had just brought the Wild Cats to such a sandy spot. This Mississippi-style blues singer, who occasionally busked in Italy’s piazzas, is also hoping to finish what she describes as her “long overdue album.” She is also thinking up another project, this time one that will help the young boys of the nearby Pangarap shelter. She could bring in some Australian graffiti artists to teach “public art, graffiti, stencil and silk printing,” she says. “We intend to create an outside graffiti gallery using ugly wall spaces that lead to Loring Street.” There is also a plan to conduct workshops for teenagers in poor areas.
As for the Wild Cats, she is keeping them motivated. “They all know that their schooling is their first priority,” she says. “My projects hope to instill confidence and social responsibility in them. And they, in turn, would be responsible for teaching the younger children the things they have learned, whether craft or principles.”
For now, Romina continues to find ways of reinventing what is around her, be they images or lives. She is at home on Loring Street, in more ways than one. “I think I am lucky to live here. Living on Loring and being someone the girls consider a friend and an older sister have given me the opportunity to understand and love the humanity that each one of them possesses,” she says. “And how they are now aware of their own power to change things.”
For more information, please call Galleria Duemila at 833-9815/831-9990, e-mail duemila@mydestiny.com or log on to the Living on Loring Online Journal at http://livingonloring.wordpress.com. |
