Using poetry and moving images that refer to the sea as a form of cosmic reality or latent pantheism, the workshop seeks to enliven the act of “looking closer” as much as “looking ahead.” By encouraging participants to write about inner landscapes or emotions through the strict but rewarding rules of traditional sonnet writing, the workshop focused on facilitating image-making through words while highlighting a sense of wonder both in conservation work and the magnificent forms they foster. The project is part of Asian Contemporary Art Keywords Dictionary Project, which highlights four Filipino keywords or unifying prompts for collaboration :
The first Filipino keyword is Tanawin. It can both be a noun and a verb. As a noun, it means “a landscape.” As a verb, it means “the conscious act of gazing.” The second word is Dama. It can mean two different things in English. It can mean the act of having feelings or emotions. It can also mean when you physically sense something or with intuition.
Dama is the sensitivity or the “pathic” component of personality. Although it suggests “feeling”, this is to be understood in a more basic sense than implied in emotionality. In fact it is the underlying structure of emotivity – “pakiramdam” – that makes emotions possible. In a sense pakiramdam is the form whereas damdamin would be its content. The available Tagalog terms and expressions, though loosely interchangeable, nonetheless seem to indicate distinctions between sensations, emotions and sentiments and desires.
One "Loob" can relate to another only through communication and sharing in some external thing common to both of them. This can take the form of corporeality, language, material objects, and interrelation among means. Moving between “malay” and “dama”, poetry became our form of externalization. While the concept of “Loob” points to inner worlds that tend to be opaque, there are some parts we can understand through the phenomenon of similarity, difference and opacity.
In the case of the workshop, we focused on using words to picture inner and outer landscapes as with man-made aquascapes within visible and invisible walls. By using neutral footage void of color and imposed emotionality, the aquarium simultaneously mimics and represents our predominant online engagements catalyzed by physical distances born from pandemic isolation – where one swims in the same water as everyone with semi-permeable borders.. being observed while being a distant observer. By imbuing moving images with Lui Tan's music, the participants were invited to enter a mood of contemplation with comfort as with oriental ink wash paintings in Asian Art history.
Aruga
As an artist, it was only in 2019 through a residency program experience at Bamboo Curtain Studio, that I started being conscious about the work and engagement I do. I got inspired by the work of Margaret Shiu and her team and took it from there. This artist residency has also helped me connect with Taiwanese artists like Li Kuei Pi who helped us find the flower summaryet for a project we did in Taipei. Currently, I am drawn to experimental projects and volunteer work with art & biodiversity and conservation networks that enable me to use some creative or digital skills.
The next Filipino keyword is Aruga. It is the root word for pag-aaruga or “the act of nurturing / caring for.” The participants we have invited are individuals we have already worked with in the past or that we know can greatly relate and apply the concept of “care” in their professional work as artists, archivists, musicians, educators, and museum workers in cultural or biodiversity conservation work.
Nilay
The last Filipino keyword is Nilay. It is the root word for pagninilay or “the act of reflection / contemplation.” Through the poetry workshop, we exercised skills in sonnet writing to expand our ways of externalizing mental images or inner landscapes of the heart.
To facilitate this vision, I invited my friend Charms Tianzon, a performance poet, sonneteer and literature professor at De La Salle College of Saint Benilde. For her, every poem she writes is a diary entry; every line is a pump of fresh blood from one's heart and a spark of electricity in the brain. She started writing sonnets when she fell in love. She discovered it through a poetry class but never had the passion for it. It was very challenging for her at first, with feelings of failure during the first attempts. One day, she felt having success in what she thought was a challenge she couldn't overcome. That day was when she had found someone to love. The lovers came and left but her passion for sonnets (and for poetry in general) remained. Soon, she was writing all types of poems and with themes not exclusive to love. Soon, she was writing for her own personal advocacies and her dire desires to make the world a finer place to live in. She joined 100 Thousand Poets for Change (an international grassroots educational non-profit organization that focuses on the arts, especially poetry, music, and the literary arts) and established Spoken Word Manila (a platform that helps various spoken word artists and performance poets in the Philippines).
The Workshop followed seven general phases:
Imaging, Listing, Rhyming, Structuring, Writing, Editing and Sharing
I. Imaging
After explaining the type of writing style which will be applied for the day, the instructor asked all participants to close their eyes for a few minutes to recall a significant experience they had in the past, which reminded them of the sea. They then opened their eyes and examined the footage recommended to them for a few minutes.
II. Listing
The participants were asked to pick an aquarium resonance that echoed their seven sensory images based on qualities like texture, movement, mood, darkness, light, space. They listed down the words of these images in increasing order of importance – the most important being at the end of the list.
III. Rhyming
The participants were asked to think of new words: seven words that rhyme (RW) with their image words (IW) For instance, if their image is “water” for example, then a rhyme example is “sister.”
To make sure that each image word (IW) has a word that rhymes with it, they used a simple sequence labeling technique. The first pair of rhyming words was labeled AA. The last pair was labeled GG.
IV. Structuring
The participants were asked to write numbers from 1-14 vertically on their paper.
Odd numbers corresponded with image words (IW) Even numbers corresponded with the equivalent rhyming words (RW)
V. Writing
The participants were given time to write their poems. The instructor reminded them to write 7 clauses that use the words they labeled as the last word for each of the lines. To do this, they were asked to think about a story for each clause but each new clause should relate to all the other clauses.
VI. Editing
The participants were asked to check their sonnet draft if they have followed the rules of fourteen lines with a simple rhyme scheme of AABB CCDD EEFF GG. This also became an opportunity for spontaneous consultation.
VII. Sharing
Before the session ended, the participants were asked to share their work in progress. Some were able to recite a complete poem!
As the workshop was designed to follow the bare minimum requirements of a sonnet, the experimental structure enabled participants to write sonnets using their native language. Below you will find some poems written during each of the two sessions. The poems are accompanied by an English translation.