Photos: “KAPWA – Sensing Ourselves in One Another”

KAPWA is a Filipino word describing “the core value of Filipino personhood. This idea of a “shared self” opens up the heart-doors of the I to include the Other. It bridges the deepest individual recess of a person with anyone outside him or herself, even total strangers.

Straight.com: “Kapwa brings Philippine indigenous arts festival to UBC”

Photography by Reno Clement (2014)

: Bukidnon Talaandig visual artist Bert Monterona exhibits exquisite murals / tapestries! Depicting Lumad or Indigenous (Mindanao) struggles to protect the environment and way of life

: Bert Monterona at the the talking / healing circle

: Erwin Apilado of the PANCIT Arts Collective displayed enchanting water and river paintings

: PADALOY: to flow, or to let one flow :: from the CK Building through the forest to the Liu Institute, audience members were led by Kathara Indigenous Pilipino Arts Collective Society and Babette Santos to what Dennis D. Gupa KAPWA programme director called “as an assembly of Kapwa, the audience walked like devotees in a river-like path at the back…. walking from one place to another metaphorizes a ritual of contemplation, a period of ruminatin on the nature of Kapwa and its fluid expresions.”

: Biyaals of the Tsimshian Nation from Metlaktla village is a Gitsbutwada (Orca) Princess from Royal House of Medeek. (Grizzley). Biyaals shared the story of the theft of her families artifacts now housed in UBC. Still trying to recover her ancestors’ works, struck familiar tones in the stealing of ancestral lands, culture, and identities of Indigenous people worldwide.

: Biyaals and her auntie Sonia of Tshimshian Nation, Babette Santos of Kathara tribe and Grace Nono.

: Grace Nono and her ancestors

: Babette Santos of Kathara, RC Clement, and Grace Nono

: Leonora Angeles of the Rethinking River Regions (RRR) Social Justice @ UBC Network and producer of KAPWA

: ANCESTORS FAREWELL. Culled from its 2013 production BAGOBO The New People, young members of Kathara Canada performs Ancestor Farewell as we move on from our lands and territories to seek new places and things. We in the diaspora may be away from the homeland, but just like what Princess Biyaals and Gracenono Taomusic reminded us, our ancestors travel with us!