Piece by Peace

I've been in the Refusal of the Call recently, a stage in Joseph Campbell's Monomyth particularly with this art for peacebuilding calling as part of my life - work. I felt I could turn it down and I could choose not to do it as I value integrity in my process particularly with inner peace as I come to terms with heavy release and healing work these last two years. 

Children, guided dream messages, and what is possible for new ways of healing and transforming the self, community, and the earth have always been there to remind me that what I need to speak about is already from within - what I experience, what the people I know have already done, and most importantly what important life lessons are there to share about the whole story of creative peacebuilding. 

Up to the last minute resisted but on the day of the talk fully embraced for this has always been not entirely about myself but something bigger at work. I spoke  about Art for Peacebuilding for the Asia - Europe Foundation University Alumni Network's (ASEFUAN) annual conference and meeting last August 1 at the Ateneo de Manila University. 

Here's the link to the conference overview:

11th ASEFUAN Academic Conference and Annual General Meeting: Conflict Transformation and Peaceful Settlement of Disputes in Asia and Europe

Here's the link to the program:
http://www.asefuan.org/docs/agm2012_programme_public.pdf

I felt that talking about art based peacebuilding was not enough. I'm a firm believer of experience in the work. I asked the organizers to allow me to set up an experiential artmaking process. They gladly accommodated my request to be designed alongside their photo exhibit entitled Shared Heritage: As We See It. The photographs are part of a traveling exhibit featuring the works of European and Asian delegates of last year's ASEF University program. 

Alongside, I set up Piece by Peace: Weaving Shared Heritage and Shared Future an interactive "tapestry" making installation.

Piece by Peace is an interactive artmaking installation inspired by the indigenous weaving traditions around the world. Tapestries are transformed into clothing that serve as social and political identities symbolizing uniqueness and diversity. It symbolizes IDENTITY as what causes some conflict in many parts of the world. Reframing this old way into reconnecting to the essence of the cloth as an interwoven process of many elements, it becomes a process that engages more than one person in dialogue with the other. The whole process emphasized Co-Creation within Third Space between Self and Other and Self as Other in a Shared Space. 

Because its a contemporary piece inspired by the traditional craft of weaving, it is a space where Past and Future meet - where Shared Heritage and Shared Future create a Third Space for dialogue. 

Mangyan and Maguindanao weave lead the way to a path of peace, followed by new ways of weaving stories and peacemaking together as symbolized by new patterns (Photo by Louise Far)

A long blank tapestry of boxes divided into two is a continuation of traditional weaves. As visitors of go around the photo exhibits, they will find elements that are a response or symbolic of the photo panels that they can collect and bring into the tapestry. Working as a dyad in front of someone, they start engaging in a dialogue process of artmaking - combining their elements together to create a new mandalic pattern based on the principles of order, balance, and harmony.

Cross-Cultural interaction with natural elements, fabric paint, feathers, leaves, etc. ( Photo by Louise Far)

Gratitude to the dream messages about this tapestry. 

One was of a woman wearing a large cloak with an image of a woman on its design indicating its source from the Talmud. Another was of young people protesting about a violent massacre and their young spokesperson talking about the nature of things and the many layers that provide meaning to it. 

Peace of Interview

I came across my online interview with Dr. Nathan Corbitt, President and Co-Founder of BuildaBridge, an international non-profit organization working in arts relief around the world.

Last 2009, I joined their annual Arts in Transformation training in Philadelphia and learned a lot about cross-cultural art based engagements through a transformative framework.

In this interview from last year, Dr. Corbitt asked me about my work as a Peace artist as one of his materials for 2011's Institute.

You can view the interview here:



I'm excited about their invitation to be part of their International Council as their work for arts relief around the world is truly inspiring.

To know more about their amazing work, visit www.buildabridge.org.

Art + Advocacy Projects Aug 2011-March 2012

I have been to focused on inner work that I haven't had the chance to share a lot of my art activities since I arrived from Switzerland in August. Here is a documentation of my beautiful co-created art actions for peace and emergency recovery over the last 8 months :-)

Open publication - Free publishing - More arts relief

Ode to Lolo

Art is not palliative, nor an ambassador with a portfolio of goodwill, nor a distraction from persecution. It is incendiary and properly so. It sharpens us, makes us vulnerable, frightens us. All of which is to say that the practice of true art is the practice of knowledge unseduced by its own beauty. We should understand it as rational because whatever its origin, mask, or style, it is memory, it is perception, it is imagination, and it is knowledge. There is no combination more powerful than these four, and there is no void more dangerous to the human project than their loss.

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so stupifyingly cruel, that - unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, rights, or the goodwill of government - art alone can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination. 

- American Author Toni Morrison at the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival 2006

Finally, a small post about my study in arts and peacebuilding! 


....if I could really be fully present in sharing my thoughts with little time involved as I swim in more and more work! Well...I have no one to blame with so much work because, I just added more work for myself! Ok I'm being sarcastic ... but... sigh...I'm currently working as coordinator for the Mindanao Week of Peace again after doing it last year (www.kapwamindanao.weebly.com) but unlike all the work last year (with additional effort on pushing for the campaign Kapwa Tayo Mindanao), this year, I am weaving through creative and cultural activities.


But can art save the world? ...maybe Mindanao at least?
But where is my sleep? and how to pay my next rent?


Sometimes I wish I was just one of those biennale hoppers or exhibitors with regular patrons or performance artists who get to travel for free, get awards and get paid to do art that I feel sometimes never make sense or meaning. ... but that's me when I'm bitter as I work in internet cafes while my laptop is down for 3 weeks because funds have not yet arrived for the non-profit I work for. I can't blame them, its just part of the work of people who do so much for the earth. 


So before I go into the direction of bitterness, I wish ground myself and connect to why I'm really doing this.


I placed that quote by Toni Morrison to reconnect. One of my Professors under the Expressive Arts for Peacebuilding program, Carrie MacLeod shared this in class last summer.


I post this especially today, my grandfather/ Lolo Samuel's birthday.

Captain Samuel Piloten Queblatin and Purificacion Garcia Espeleta, circa 1940's

I am currently weaving in an art action for the World Day of Prayer and Action for Children on Sunday November 20 and launching the second action by children calling for the end of armed conflict. This campaign was inspired by stories of peace workers' experience of running with their parents when attacks take place only to find themselves doing it again with their own children this time. 

The Manila action’s main call will be children calling for the end of armed conflict and to mainstream children’s issues in the Peace Agenda particularly:

• Their care and protection in the Internally Displaced People’s Protection Bill (currently pending in Congress and Senate for review)

• An official commitment by the rebel groups in their non-hiring of children as soldiers in their troops (The Philippines is still in the US watch list of countries with child soldiers)

• To fast-track the peace process to find accord for lasting and sustainable peace in the present generation (currently the 4th generation experiencing the conflict since it began in the 1970’s.)

During the ceremony, we will ask children from migrant families in Taguig under Anak Mindanao and children from the Dar Amanah Children’s Village Foundation in Cavite who were orphaned from the war in Mindanao. We will ask them to burry toy guns and plant seedlings at the ceremony site.

In the afternoon, I will share a short workshop from my training in Sri Lanka last August using the Learning to Live Together Manual, a UNESCO and UNICEF endorsed set of modules on interfaith and intercultural education for children. Afterwards, together with artist and friend Michelle Ting, I will share a mural activity called Isang Habing Mandala para sa Kapayapaan/ One Weave Mandala for Peace. This will be a collaborative mural using the Islamic, Christian, and Lumad mandala patterns of the faiths and cultures of Mindanao using stencil designs and paint. We intend to have these painted on the LRT Central Station Pillars in front of the Arroceros park where the ceremony will be held. 

Of course, this work with integrating creativity in peacebuilding is also personal.


Apart from my own experience of healing  through the arts for my own childhood abuse traumas that have repeated throughout my youth and early adult life --- its also a bridging with my ancestors.


My Lolo Sam was the Captain of a platoon during World War II and he passed away because his lungs failed from years of alcoholism and smoking. This addiction was a means of coping from PTSD that war soldiers never get healed from during their time. From stories, I learned that he was event sent to the psychiatric hospital. Who could blame him? He was hunted down by the Japanese and he travelled widely on food and on a carabao for his life - for he was a Father and a husband. He witnessed his own soldiers being beheaded in front of his eyes. 


I am posting this maybe because all these terrorism, bombings, and civil wars sprouting around the world today reminds me that this is not new. My grandparents' generation who experienced the World Wars are already leaving the Earth in this lifetime. Will their stories be remembered so peace is something we can value?


Right now, I am like a child again having my lunch with my Lola/Grandmother hearing about Lolo's adventures of escape from the Japanese soldiers. As a child, I was so fascinated by how brave he was after escaping death one too many times especially because Lola told the story with lots of pride and love.... Now as a young adult, I look back, I didn't see that it also was about how vulnerable he was... how fragile a grown man can be in the face of threat and death. This war affected him so much, just as it has transformed the lives of millions... the way we see the world... I wonder, how much we have grown and evolved as humanity considering all the arms and nuclear bombs we manufacture everyday. 


I continue to wonder.


Sigh...it's 5:30 am... back to work.