The Story of Our Imagination
Find out about the Philippines' journey to the Guest of Honour Role and the inspiration behind its theme
- History
- Curatorial Theme
- Visual Identity
History
Cooperating Agencies
The Philippines takes center stage as Guest of Honour at the 77th Frankfurt Book Fair 2025. This national initiative is made possible through the collaboration of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the National Book Development Board, the Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Office of Hon. Senator Loren Legarda.
A Collaborative Effort by
National Book Development Board
The National Book Development Board is a national agency created through Republic Act 8047, also known as the Book Publishing Industry Development Act, showing the government’s commitment to the vital role of books in shaping our nation. NBDB is responsible for creating and carrying out a National Book Policy and a National Book Development Plan to help grow the book publishing industry.
National Commission for Culture and the Arts
The National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) is the Philippines’ overall policy-making body, coordinating and grant-giving agency for the preservation, development, and promotion of Philippine arts and culture.
Department of Foreign Affairs
The Department of Foreign Affairs is the primary agency responsible for Philippine policy through its foreign service posts and is the primary representative of the Philippine government overseas.
Office of Hon. Senator Loren Legarda
Senator Loren Legarda is the driving force behind the Philippines’ Guest of Honour participation at the 2025 Frankfurt Book Fair. Since 2015, she has championed this vision, uniting three key agencies and bringing together the right people to turn this landmark initiative into reality.
Our Story
Called “the first major artistic manifestation of Asian resistance to European colonialism,” Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere tells the story of Crisostomo Ibarra and his life, intertwined with the Philippines’ struggle against the cruelty and corruption of the Spanish colonial government. In his book Brains of the Nation, National Artist Resil Mojares said that the publication of Noli Me Tangere in 1887 was “a pivotal moment in Philippine intellectual history” and that it was “radically seditious in having been written by a native in a manner that actualizes in Europe’s own discursive form, the capacity of the Filipino to comprehend, represent, and hence direct [their] own society.”
Rizal’s novels, Noli Me Tangere and its sequel El Filibusterimo, still hold sway in Philippine literature today. Their ideas of politics, nationalism, and social observation were so powerful that they were proscribed by the Spanish colonial government but circulated among the people. For his perceived subversions, Rizal was exiled and executed by the colonial government in 1896, yet his works have lit a fire inside Filipinos and their dissident consciousness.
Rizal’s friend Valentin Ventura wrote to Rizal from Paris, noting the effects that Noli has been having on the ground: “[your] campaign in the Philippines has not been completely in vain.”
Since the Noli, many iterations of the Filipino imagination have continued to animate Filipino literature, one that will be presented anew and amplified as the Philippines assumes its role as the Guest of Honour of the 2025 Frankfurter Buchmesse (FBM), globally known as the Frankfurt Book Fair, though the path is not one without challenges.
The First Participation
The first-ever National Book Development Board (NBDB) participation in the FBM was in 1998. Forty-five publishers displayed 302 book titles under the theme Centennial of the Philippine Independence. The Philippine stand was eight square meters.
The Philippines continued to participate for two years until 2000, and it only resumed its participation in 2015. NBDB sent two delegates, then NBDB Chair Flor Marie Sta. Romana Cruz and Executive Director III Graciela Mendoza Cayton, who had gone on an exploratory visit the year before, in 2014.
Since there was no budget for designing the country stand, Karina Bolasco, then Director of Ateneo De Manila University Press and NBDB Board member, reached out to Senator Loren Legarda in 2015 as she knew the senator to be one who was committed to passionately supporting the arts and culture sector. The Senator helped by referring to an agency that could provide support to the participants. Since then, Senator Legarda has given the NBDB additional financial support for the Philippine participation in the FBM.
This also marked the beginning of the Philippines’ campaign to become Guest of Honour.
Road to Becoming Guest of Honour
Senator Legarda became the project visionary behind the country’s bid for the Guest of Honour in 2015. Bolasco informed her of the FBM and its importance.
Senator Legarda met with FBM officials led by Juergen Boos, President and CEO of the FBM, during their visit to Manila. In the same year, the Philippines submitted its Letter of Intent for Guest of Honour through then NBDB Chairperson Romana-Cruz.
In another meeting with Boos in Frankfurt, Senator Legarda was accompanied by then Philippine Ambassador to Germany Theresa de Vega, Deputy Consul General Emil Fernandez, NBDB Chair Sta. Romana-Cruz, NBDB Board Member Bolasco, while the latter was accompanied by FBM Vice President Claudia Kaiser. Senator Legarda inquired about the requirements for bids for the Guest of Honour country.
Senator Legarda again met with the FBMr officials in July 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Discussions focused on how the pandemic had affected the bids, but the Senator emphasized that the Philippines remained committed to complying with the requirements for becoming a Guest of Honour. It was during this meeting that the year to become Guest of Honour had to be delayed to 2025 due to the pandemic.
In June 2023, Senator Legarda met again with the FBM Officials. This time, Boos announced that the FBM Board had approved the proposal for the Philippines to become GoH in 2025. Administrative requirements were discussed again during this meeting.
On August 18, 2023, the official Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with the Philippines as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair was signed in Davao City by FBM officials, headed by Juergen Boos, and the NBDB, led by Chair Dante Francis Ang II.
Once the Guest of Honour MOA was finalized, it became evident that executing this initiative would demand significant resources and coordination. The Philippine Pavilion in 2025 features a 2,000-square-meter pavilion, a strategically curated selection of books and authors, a dynamic cultural program, and a communications campaign designed to maximize global visibility.
In response, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, NBDB, the Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Office of Hon. Senator Loren Legarda came together to form the Philippines as Guest of Honour committees, leveraging each agency’s expertise and commitment. This collaboration ensures the Philippines’ publishing industry, and its key players will be highlighted and given the international focus it has worked hard to attain.
Curatorial Theme
The Guest of Honour spaces of the Philippines of the Frankfurt Book Fair will play out under the title The imagination peoples the air. It is lifted from Jose Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere, written in Germany in 1887, specifically from the chapter on Sisa. The full line is:
The imagination peoples the air
with specters
translated by Charles Derbyshire from the original Spanish. In the said section of the novel, the unhinged mother, Sisa, whose two sons, Crispin and Basilio, had gone missing and whom she would seek in desperation, one beaten, the other accused of theft.
She later would die in the forest to be buried by Basilio. In the ominous episode, as she waited for them deep into the evening, her mind would wander and mutate, startled by the howling of a black dog. Rizal describes the condition of darkness as teeming, as the night is disposed to belief or conjuration, the period when the “imagination peoples the air with specters.” These specters creep into the body: “Suddenly she felt her hair rise on her head and her eyes stared wildly; illusion or reality, she saw Crispin standing by the fireplace.”
While Derbyshire translates “imaginación” as imagination, in the context of Sisa’s life as a distraught but resolute woman, her belief in possibility may be more sharply seen as speculative rather than a fully formed object like an imagination. Thus, the Filipino term “hiwatig” becomes more apt because it considers premonition, instinct, presentiment, suspicion, and so on; it is more openly preternatural, and therefore more inter-species and mystical, than exclusively humanist.
The poetry here evokes the power of the book as the source of imagination and speculation. The noun “people” becomes a verb that signifies the habitation or the fleshing out of the atmosphere. Nature and history, ethos, and ecology come together beautifully in this ensemble. The keywords of imagination, people, and air allude to the elements of the writing and reading context: the producers and receivers of texts; the talent of the idiosyncratic individual who reads and writes, and the community gathered by the air emanating from and animating books. For Filipinos, at the heart of books is the promise of sharing, a collective aspiration to be present in the world of stories, ideas, myths, fantasies, and the future. The Guest of Honour pavilion will be the space, the climate for sharing: democratic, deliberative, daring, convivial, peopled by imagination, prompted to action by speculation.
The Philippines is excited and confident to stage its pavilion as Guest of Honour country at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2025. The excitement stems from the premise that the book fair is not a travel or trade fair and therefore should not function as a marketing initiative that favors themes easily and readily captured by the populist mind accustomed to the shorthand of advertising. It instead aims to promote Philippine books, including their translations, with care, acuity, style, and intellectual dignity; and share with the world the robust history of writers and readers, the nation’s literacy and literature, and the levels of sophistication that these have reached.
It is with this sensitive intelligence that the Philippines conceptualizes its Guest of Honour position without losing the joy and liveliness of the fair as a convergence of bookmakers, book lovers, and their broad public. It is this substantial Philippine air — metaphoric, elemental, metamorphic — that will be felt through the vital presence of people reading books together in the pavilion.
Central in this regard is the oral traditions of the Philippines that will complicate the primacy of the written culture. The pavilion will foreground both the literacy and orality in the Philippines, the literature of both voice and word.
Moreover, the Philippines is aware of the context of the Guest of Honour status. In this light, it offers a trajectory that will pursue the historical link between the Philippines and Germany. This trajectory, which is at once a genealogy and an urgency, is no less than Jose Rizal, National Hero, exceptional writer, reader, polymath, and inspiration of countless Filipinos, writing alongside him and reading him in times revolutionary and otherwise. Rizal’s engagement with Germany and notable German figures is part of this framework, and so is Rizal’s relationship with home and exile that forged international solidarity in the 19th through the 20th centuries in Southeast Asia, as well as the necessary resonance with the current Philippine diaspora. Such a context provides prospects for organizing exhibitions and related projects in Heidelberg, where Rizal studied; Berlin, where Noli Me Tangere was published; and Frankfurt, where the Book Fair will take place.
Patrick Flores
Curator, Philippine Pavilion
Visual Identity
The visual identity represents the theme: The imagination peoples the air while conveying the act of ‘imagining’ as a graphic and geometric abstraction brought to life. To imagine is to form ideas, visions, and sensations until an image becomes concrete. The main logo visualizes this process: an ascending grid — as imagining lifts us up in the air, spiritually or mentally — that starts transparent from the left up until it becomes more solid.
Books are fueled by imagination, especially those that push the boundaries of Philippine literature, from the epics of extraordinary beings passed down via oral tradition to the retooling of pre-colonial myths for the modern audience. The logo “takes flight,” with the letters following this ascending angle as well, recalling the collective aspirations of the nation.
The 9 x 15 grid has 135 dots, which can also be seen as particles of imagination, falling into place from their amorphous state until they take a more substantial form.
The grid is inspired by three things: the process of letterpress printing in the 19th century, when the Noli was born; the halftone printing technique, which breaks images into dots to produce continuous imagery; and the pattern of dots that are present in the screens of many devices that we use today.
This printing inspiration theme is also present in the typefaces used for the Philippine Guest of Honor’s visual identity. Neue Haas Grotesk and Adobe Jenson Pro are approximations of the typefaces used in the first printing of the Noli. Neue Haas Grotesk, or Helvetica, is inspired by the famous 19th-century (1890s) typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk, which was used around the 1890s. Meanwhile, the serif typeface Adobe Jenson combines Renaissance-era typefaces created by Nicolas Jenson and Ludovico degli Arrighi.
The colors used in the visual identity are also anchored by the theme’s literary source, using Rizal’s descriptions that conjure vivid colors of settings and characters. The Noli comes to life with passages such as “the sand was gold-dust and the stones,” or “ the sky was blue and a fresh breeze,” or “the green rice-fields” to bring to life Rizal’s Philippines — all blending into a powerful work of literature.
Finally, the visual design of the Philippine Guest of Honour in FBM 2025 also includes glyphs, a more playful representation of imagination that can be decoded and used as hints into the richness of Philippine culture.
The glyphs are inspired by the baybayin script, the ancient writing system used by early Filipinos before the Spanish colonization. The glyphs here represent elements or objects found in the Noli, inspired by the invented writing system that one of the characters, the sage Pilosopo Tasio, uses for his writings for the future generation. He says, “But the generation that deciphers these characters will be an intelligent generation, it will understand and say, ‘Not all were asleep in the night of our ancestors!’”
The glyphs used here come from recognizable images — especially related to the theme. The imagination peoples the air — such as the profile of Sisa, the lightning that becomes a threat to her sons, the belfry that knells for the souls, and the howling dog that Sisa imagines.
Visual Identity by Dino Brucelas