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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October 15, 2025
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, fellow Filipinos, friends of the Philippines:
As we close this meaningful gathering, allow me to express my profound gratitude to everyone who made possible the rebirth of Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo in the German language – to Suhrkamp Verlag, Morio Verlag, the translators and scholars who labored tremendously and with love, for ensuring that Rizal continues to speak to the world.
There is deep symbolism in being here in Frankfurt, not far from Berlin and […]
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October 15, 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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