filmed and Edited by Angel Velasco Shaw

Art that communicates, art that collaborates and art that is entirely human.

In the Realities and the surreality that exists in one world we must remeber to get out of our box and see the world through their eyes.

The Living on Loring exhibit has been moved to Museo Pambata. Together with Romina Diaz and Ann Wizer. The Wildcats Girls will be responsible for 2 kids each ranging from 8 to 12 years old passing on the skills that they have learned from the “Living on Loring” workshop conducted last February to April at the Galleria Duemila on Loring street in Pasay City.

They will be constructing treasure boxes filled with childhood dreams, putting inside these colorful boxes things that they dream and wish for. With hopes that in envisioning their dreams, a certain confidence inside them pushes them to better and change their lives.
On the 4th and the 11th of June will be the workshops conducted by Both Artist Romina Diaz and Ann Wizer, each artist will be responsible of a different day. The 11th will be dedicated to the construction of the treasure chest, filling the box with pictures of dreams. The 11th of June will be dedicated to recycling, an art mastered by Ann Wizer herself. Using found objects they will create beautiful pieces they can fill their treasure chests with.

Like toy cars made of bottles and necklaces made of plastic pieces and who knows what a child’s hands and mind can create. “Living on Loring” is an experience that must be passed on, not just from artist to student but from person to person. It is an example of society working together in order to create a better world.

The “Living on Loring concept” is designed to remind us about the individuality of each of these children. That despite their lack of fortune, material belongings and education, they all have a beating heart that moves an innocent mind to make beautiful things, in hopes that they just might remind forgetful hearts that a great humanity exists and we must act upon it

The launching of the MOVING LORING exhibit will be on the 14th of June at the Museo Pambata, along with the dollhouses and the installation photographs they took during their workshop that was exhibited at Galleria Duemila. They will be displayed at one of the museums major hall ways, accompanied by the 25 treasure chest that the Luneta children will make in the 2 workshops.

Museo Pambata will be exhibiting the show for 1 month in hopes that other foundations and groups will look into this interactive installation and inspire other communities to move forward with the dream.

Musicians, please donate your talent. We cannot pay you a talent fee or an honorarium, but we will try to feed you, and there will be press and it will be exposure. Non-musical? Not a problem, you can still help by donating Php1000 for a street food cart. Broke? Please pass the word and help us get this opening together, and attend, bring everyone you know.

Reply here if you can help out…just a little support is life support to others, remember that. Tugtugan na!

Living on Loring :

ROMINA A. DIAZ: 09272272951
www.livingonloring.wordpress.com
Diazromina@gmail.com

Galleria Duemila, Inc. Art Gallery:
210 Loring Street Pasay City
Metro Manila, Philippines
www.galleriaduemila.com
T +63 (2)8319990
F +63 (2)8339815
duemila@mydestiny.net.ph

Museo Pambata Foundation, Inc.

http://www.museopambata.org/

Museo Pambata
Roxas Boulevard corner South Drive
Manila, Philippines 1000
Telephone: (632) 523.1797 to 98, 536-0595
Facsimile: (632) 522.1246
Mobile: 0918-382-2212
Email: info@museopambata.org

(an excerpt from Anabel’s Journal, dated February 17, 2008)

Walking the down Loring Street at noon in my shorts and flipflops I was assaulted by “our girls” screaming “Ate Anabel! Ate Anabel!” I felt a bit like the pied piper as I was let through the gate into the Gallery, with my gaggle of girls asking 300 questions as I tried to wake up my still-sleeping brain (it was a Saturday and I had slept at 7am earlier). Romina was about, zipping in and out of the house and the gallery, trying to get things organized for the creative writing chapter of the workshop which Ginny and I would be holding. Outside the gallery were the boxes the girls have been working on, and I got momentarily lost in them- feeling partly a child, as they were- playing with dollhouses they have built. I had to supress the urge to cry- the girls put their dreams into these boxes, not unlike the way I do- though my dreams are written in journals and cocktail napkins, mostly- I too, have photographs I keep that do not have me in them or are of places I have never been to. I could relate- a lot of what these girls want is to go to college (like me, I still often dream of going to school), of a life with a few more creature comforts than a roof over their heads (which is also all that I have), a life with security, where they feel safe, where they feel loved- isn’t that what most of us really just want?

As the girls came in, I scanned their faces, looking for a specific girl- Laarni. She’s had my heart since this project started months ago, when she peppered me with questions and slipped her hand into mine walking down the street from her shanty. She is a beautiful girl, with sad eyes and long hair- she reminds me of my own little girl, Mishaela. The day I met her, she had told me she hoped to go to college and maybe take up computer science. She asked me about Mishka, what she does, what she likes. I promised her I’d find out what her name means for her, as she does have such a lovely name. I still have yet to keep that promise- but now I want to give all the girls (12 of them) the meanings of their names- origin wise, anyway. They give their names more meaning than they could imagine. Anyway, there I was, looking for Laarni. Romina told me she might not come to the workshop- her mother had pulled her out. I had to supress the rage I could feel rising in me. I was tempted to go out and look for her in the shanty town of Loring and speak to her mother. But I didn’t. It is not my place. It turned out I didn’t have to- Laarni made it anyway, very late, but she made it.

We began the workshop and the one thing I noticed about these girls is how LOUD they are. Even hours after we ended, my ears were still ringing. They scream at each other, not talk. Silvana mused that maybe they speak so loudly since they are often overlooked and ignored, the only way to be heard is by sheer volume. It’s a theory I don’t disprove. We did the senses exercise with the girls, blindfolding them and having them taste, touch and smell different things- trying to draw out an emotion/memory/idea from these things. Later on, we played audio of waves, maria callas’ ave maria, laughter, farts etc and showed them photographs, trying to get them to tell stories about what they see or what it makes them feel. Not all the girls could be drawn out, however by the exercise. I thought the workshop we did at Women’s Crisis Center was tough- this was a lot tougher. These girls are young- but in some ways so old, too- but their age comes through with their preoccupation with High School Musical, A1 (there’s a band called A1? I thought it was a steak sauce), and the boys they have crushes on.

But several of the girls stand out: there is, of course, my Laarni, there’s Ging-Ging (otherwise known as Mary Grace) who is 10 years old and Romina or I had to shadow throughout the exercises since she cannot read nor write (her family will not let her go to school)- who made me melt when she told me (since I was writing for her) that it sounded like her mother each time she gives birth when we played the audio of the woman screaming and the baby crying. Despite her handicap, Ging-ging wanted to participate in this workshop and she has spunk, that one. Also there was Jessa, who is a girl after my own heart- everything reminds her of

food. No wonder she wants to be a chef when she grows up.

I’m still getting to know these girls, and strangely, as the process happens, I am getting to know about myself- the girl I once was, who had dreams too, who grew up maybe a little too fast….

I was exhausted after the workshop, barely able to stand (so was Ginny). I don’t know how Romina does this almost everyday, working with the girls. The project was aimed to find out who these girl’s find as their heroes, instead, they became mine.

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.

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

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.