The imagination peoples the air
Pinupuno ang hangin ng hiwatig
Fantasie beseelt die Luft
- Guest of Honour Theme
- Visual Identity
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 by Dino Brucelas
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.