Message of Senator Loren Legarda | Launch of the Rizal Ethnographic Objects in a Digital Exhibition |17 October 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 felt the magnitude of Rizal’s genius. He not only wrote the moral chronicles of our awakening but also documented the richness and complexity of the Filipino way of life.

Those objects began a journey. I wrote to then–Museum Director, Dr. Viola König, to propose an exhibition that would bring these materials into public view in Manila in 2020 and honor Rizal’s contributions to Philippine anthropology. For years, we worked with the National Museum of the Philippines to prepare for this collaboration. The global pandemic in 2020 may have postponed our plans, but it never diminished my resolve to see this realized.
Through persistence and partnership, the dialogue never ceased. Access was finally granted for our scholars to study and document the Rizal Ethnographic Collection. High-resolution imaging, material analysis, and curatorial notes were shared with the Philippines—a moment that transformed years of advocacy into tangible progress.

With the help of National Museum Director-General Jeremy Barns and Dr. Maria Cristina Martinez-Juan, who serves as co-curator of this project, this digital exhibition transforms scholarship into accessibility. Every textile and artifact Rizal once donated now lives on a digital platform—an enduring collaboration between Filipino and German institutions. It stands as a model of how diplomacy, heritage, and technology can converge to recover history and bring it back to life. This includes hybrid lectures by distinguished scholars and historians who continue to expand its context and meaning.

That this exhibition is launched here at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, during the Philippines’ year as Guest of Honour, carries profound significance. The world gathers here to share stories; today, ours extends beyond literature into the realms of science, anthropology, and shared human heritage. Rizal’s gesture of friendship with German scholars has come full circle—renewed through modern partnership and a shared commitment to knowledge.

This project affirms what I have always believed: diplomacy is not confined to negotiation tables. It thrives on collaboration among museums, universities, and cultural institutions, and it endures wherever we build understanding through knowledge exchange.
I invite everyone to explore this digital exhibition, to listen to the stories embedded in every item, and to see how our heritage now connects us anew across nations and generations.

Thank you.