November 10, 2025
Your Excellency, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon; distinguished colleagues from the Ban Ki-moon Foundation, Stanford APARC, the UP Asian Center, our partner institutions, and dear friends—good day.
It is my honor to host this luncheon and to welcome you all to Manila for this Trans-Pacific Sustainability Dialogue. When Secretary-General Ban visited the Senate last year, I had the joy of welcoming him and Madame Yoo to my home. Over laing, bagnet, tinolang manok, and halo-halo, we were reminded that the best policy conversations […]
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October 24, 2025
Thank you very much, Ms. Gretchen Ho.
Bumabati po ako sa inyong lahat ngayong hapong ito. First of all, our friends, distinguished members of the Diplomatic Corps, thank you for taking time out this afternoon to join us.
Tell your other colleagues, it’s not just today, it’s opened yesterday until the 29th and we have plans of having a permanent, not just showroom, but a permanent store in the different regions of the country, so that all our MSMEs will have their […]
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October 17, 2025
Twelve years ago, in 2013, I was shown a remarkable collection of Filipino textiles and ethnographic objects housed in the Berlin Ethnological Museum—a Bagobo blouse, a Manobo jacket, a Mandaya abaca baby carrier, a Blaan wrap-around skirt, to name a few.
Dr. Roland Platz, the museum’s curator for South and Southeast Asia, explained that these were among the items Dr. José Rizal had donated to his friends, Dr. Adolf Bastian and Dr. Rudolf Virchow. Seeing them for the first time, I […]
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October 16, 2025
When art takes shape in words, thought finds its form. Words transform perception into meaning, revealing how ideas shape our understanding of the world. This is the sensibility that runs through Patrick Flores’s essays, bound together in a book, “Sensible Form.” This collection of essays stands apart from its disciplined clarity, its refusal of empty statements, and its persistent attention to the details that are most significant.
Patrick Flores’s approach is consistent: he views the act of interpretation, as it were, […]
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October 16, 2025
When Spain first arrived on our shores, it encountered a people who already governed themselves with order, traded across islands, and spoke in languages as diverse and expressive as the landscapes they inhabited. Long before the first chroniclers set ink to paper, the Philippines was already a nation of thought and discernment.
Today, we return to those early encounters through The Gallery of Spanish Travellers to the Philippines—a work that gathers centuries of observation, imagination, and exchange. From 1521 to the […]
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