Literary & Cultural Programs

*permanent exhibition

What echoes linger in the silences of historical archives? Can the sounds of our ancestors, preserved in fragile wax cylinders and fading magnetic tapes, speak truths beyond fidelity?

In Pagtatahip, meLê yamomo invites audiences into an immersive sonic weaving of past and present, where the reverberations of empire and memory are brought into resonance. Rendered through Ambisonics and Wave Field Synthesis, The Listening Space at the Humboldt Forum’s Hörrraum becomes a site of acoustic excavation—a resonant crucible where colonial echoes stir. Archival recordings—of a Malay soldier held in a WWI German camp intoning loss in captivity; of indigenous Kalinga soundscapes captured by early twentieth-century European composers amidst the aesthetic fervor of musical Orientalism; of a Filipino librarian in 1920s Berlin voicing anti- colonial poetry; and of a Javanese dancer on European tour cantillating the Panji epics—resound from Berlin’s Phonogrammarchiv and Lautarchiv as living traces on exile. These spectral voices intermingle with contemporary field recordings by meLê and his brother Jay—lullabies, intimate murmurs between father and son, and echoes from a Southeast Asian village once called home. Together, they form a tapestry of dislocation and return, where the sonic debris of colonial encounter intertwines with familial memory, inviting a listening across an entire century,

This piece weaves a fractured yet vivid tapestry of personal and collective memory— one that beats with the resonances of displacement, colonial legacies, and cultural reclamation. Sound waves within the space becomes a mode of inquiry as listeners navigate an acoustic landscape sculpted by technological imperfections—scratches, static, and ghostly resonances—the witness to histories both hidden and inherited.

Pagtatahip—the rhythmic winnowing of rice casts grains into the air, integrating the wind in the process what stays and what scatters—is a community wisdom at work of filtering significance from noise. As husks feed the earth, discarded yet essential, what forgotten histories nourish our collective understanding? Listen closely; within the whispers of past archives might emerge the clarity of the grains we choose to keep.

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Contemporary Filipino Architecture is at the nexus of interconnected and intersecting forces. Once imagined as limited within the confines of the Philippines as a geographical setting, Filipino Architecture is recast as the continuous flow of people, places, and processes. “Sulog”, a Cebuano term that refers to “water currents”, encapsulates the dynamic ebbs and flows of Filipino Architecture that is born of an archipelagic setting and whose sense of becoming is enmeshed within crosscurrents of multiple flows and network exchanges.

The exhibit is inspired by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s conception of “Global Cultural Flow” (1990) as an intersecting transnational network of exchange between people, goods, economics, politics, and ideas. He suggests that we need to understand these cultural flows across geo-political boundaries through the five dimensions of ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes. Following this framework, we can then also understand that the production, consumption, and mediation of architecture are embedded within the ever-dynamic currents of movement that could never be limited to just one idea of territory. Thus, we can think of architecture as not simply emerging from a single nation or country but instead as a confluence of cultural exchanges occurring across time and space.

Three interlocking themes emerge from this reconceptualization of Filipino Architecture. First, “People as Network” presents architecture and the built environment as emerging from the imagination, experience, and engagement with people. In this sense, we understand architecture through the Filipino architects, collaborators, clients, communities, mentors, educational lineages, and the diaspora of the Filipino people across the world. Second, “Places as Flux” highlights the built environment as fundamentally grounded in places. Under such conception, an idea of place can cover a multitude of aspects of architecture, such as the site context, tropical climate, geological, geography, culture, history, and placemaking. Third, “Process as Flows” acknowledges the decision-making processes involved in the production and consumption of architecture through materials, construction, participatory methods, community engagement, heritage conservation, and the socio-political context.

As contemporary Filipino architecture emerges from the dynamic crosscurrents and interplay between people, places, and processes, it would also need to transform dynamically in the future. What kind of changes will have to occur between these networks and flows of people, places, and processes in the future? It is only by accepting that change is inevitable in Filipino Architecture that we can achieve its potential as a contributor to the global discourse and production of the built environment.

Press Material

In light of the dynamic practice of visual culture across time in the Philippines, this exhibition presents a diverse selection of photographic works from an archipelago in Southeast Asia. The artists explore a range of concerns: personal identity, tradition, spirituality, storytelling, migrant labor, urban life, survival, memory, and the concept of home. All these trains its lens on both deeply personal narratives and broader social reflections.

Rooted in a complex colonial history and shaped by stark social contradictions, Philippine photographic art often indexes moments of transformation and resilience. Through experimental portraits, installations, and compelling documentary styles, the exhibited works foreground emerging subjectivities, lived realities, and cultural processes.

The participating artists include Xyza Cruz Bacani, Nana Buxani, Tommy Hafalla, Gina Osterloh, Augustine Paredes, Wawi Navarroza, Veejay Villafranca, and MM Yu.

This contribution by Fotografie Forum Frankfurt is organized on the occasion of the Philippines as the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2025. New Beginnings: Philippine Photographic Art is curated by Patrick Flores, Andrea Horvay, and Celina Lunsford.

Pieces of Life: The Philippine Collection in Heidelberg explores the Philippine collection at the Völkerkundemuseum Heidelberg. The exhibition sheds light on the material culture of Philippine communities in conversation with contemporary art. The collection includes possessions and belongings across the Philippine archipelago: baskets, personal adornment, textile, domestic objects, beads, agricultural and fishing equipment, weapons, among others. The exhibition also reflects on the implications of collecting these materials in the context of the history and museology of the Volkerkundemuseum Heidelberg.

The exhibition focuses on texts of the Passion of Christ from the Philippines. The Passion texts reveal the story of the suffering of Christ and his death that leads to salvation. These texts testify to the production of text and image in the telling of a religious narrative that becomes a performative tradition during the Lenten season in the Philippines

The exhibition will feature pages from the texts that reveal modes of poetics, translation, graphic design, printing techniques, and drawings.

The exhibition surveys the history of Severino Reyes’s Mga Kwento ni Lola Basyang from its initial production to its iterations in various media: illustrated book, dance, television, and cinema.

Stories for children form an important part of the Philippine literary tradition. And as this particular example demonstrates, they have belonged to the collective imagination of the public culture.

The exhibition will feature the various articulations of the story in books, visual culture, and the mass media.