A Philippine spring in Paris

European visitors are happily surprised at the different view of the Philippines offered by the big exhibition on this country in Paris, observes Constance de Monbrison, its French co-curator.

To Corazon Alvina, Filipina co-curator of “Archipelago of Exchanges,” this response is because of the qualities brought to light by the exhibition’s focus on the Philippines’ art of indigenous peoples.

The exhibition Alvina and de Monbrison co-curated at Paris’ Musée du quai Branly is already a reliable crowd-drawer, two weeks after its opening.

 Europeans who have in the past associated the Philippines with its Latino heritage are now spending long, meditative hours taking in the elegance and fine aesthetic figuration of Ifugao sculpture, Mindanao textiles, and gold jewelry and earthenware from archeological sites.

The audience response is unanimously enthusiastic over a previously unknown sophistication (no kitschy Hollywood-bowdlerized bulols here), command over form and technique (no lowly “crafts”), and power that is accurately described as spiritual (no over-emphasis on pre-colonial political power).

Almost all the 300-some artworks are more than a century old; some, aged half a millennium and more. Alvina and de Monbrisson gathered exceptional pieces from the stored Philippine collections of the Musée du quai Branly, the Leiden Museum of Anthropology in the Netherlands, the Museum für Volkenkünde in Austria, Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, and the American Museum of Natural History of New York City, among others. They juxtaposed these pieces with equally compelling traditional art objects loaned by the most discerning collectors in France, the United States, and the Philippines.

From the astonishment expressed by museum visitors, Alvina and de Monbrisson clearly succeeded in fleshing out the partial picture provided by the more accessible objects at the Ayala Museum, the National Museum, and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.

Exhibited with the objects from European and North American collections, the pieces on loan from Philippine public holdings are set by the co-curators in a thought-provoking context. For it is now hugely evident that the layer of Philippine history and culture that is most similar across the archipelago is evenly characterized by a common lack of excess, a sense of interior integrity (rather than outward projection), and mastery over materials and techniques that
have substantial historical depth in the archipelago.

In this exhibition, a unified whole emerges that could be justifiably called traditional Philippine culture. The adjective “precolonial” does not account for all that is available for view, however, particularly in that many pieces exhibit local re-workings of ideas from places far from the archipelago.

For example, the arabesques of Mindanao okir do refer to the Middle Eastern tradition. But notwithstanding these in-takes of cultural ideas from distant parts, a coherent local sensibility is made self-evident by an exhibition that breaks free of stereotypical ideas about the Philippines. That sensibility is defined by graceful abstraction and attention to the tiniest detail.

It is this elegance – to be consistently seen in precisely-dated, pre-20th century objects from the Cordilleras to Sulu – that has stunned the crowds.

And it is the co-curators’ clarity of intention that has persuaded Paris museum visitors to consider a country whose ancient art emerged, not from extremely hierarchical societies, but from a still partially-understood, animist interest in the worth of matters unseen, or merely suggested, or deftly implied by shape or texture.

The co-curators share their eye for this mesmerizing level of Philippine culture with Stephane Martin, Musée du quai Branly president, who initiated the exhibition project more than five years ago with Alvina, at that time the director of the National Museum.

Both Martin and Alvina were the top leaders of the Asia-Europe Museum Network. The organization was founded with the support of Fr. Gabriel Casal during his term as National Museum director in the 1980’s. Casal thus helped lay the groundwork for a collegial, congenial environment in which, eventually, such projects as the present exhibition can be discussed by succeeding generations of European and Asian curators.

Aligning closely with the curatorial mission of the Musée du quai Branly– to celebrate the art of non-Western peoples – the trio of Martin, Alvina, and de Monbrison created an exhibition that settles all debate about the worthiness of the Philippine traditional cultural expressions within the sanctified status of art. Alvina has been giving interviews to the European press, notably, Le Monde, Figaro, Monocle, History Today, as well as the wire agencies led by Agence France Presse – which have run features articulating the mind-changing scale of the exhibit. Their interest is focused by a fresh view of the Philippines and its indigenous cultures as complex and refined.

The Musée du Quai Branly’s significant investment of financial and professional resources to this little-discerned dimension of Philippine culture pays off in the possibility of no less than a paradigm shift.

Archipelago of Exchanges is on exhibit until July 14.