MANILA.- Being raised in the mountains means always seeing the world at an altitude. The expansive becomes intuitive, and the interconnected is reliable. This is examined in John Frank Sabado’s portraits of people who have shaped his sense of communality from childhood. In Leonardo Aguinaldo’s works, the figures see themselves as seeing the world change and how they wish to be seen in it.

In one of his pieces, Aguinaldo references a colonial image of Igorots gazing at rice terraces. He superimposes the view of terraces with giant blocks resembling modern buildings and teeming with the iconic drop pin symbol. In another work, a local is poised atop a horse as if surveying the land. But the mountain trails are missing, and Aguinaldo paints a map of a city. The artist connotes converting agricultural gardens into grotesque tourist theme parks, a current and popular economic choice for landed locals.

Aguinaldo, whose house sits on the side of a mountain overlooking La Trinidad Valley and parts of Baguio City, noticed a more-than-usual surge of construction projects during the COVID-19 pandemic. He began a series of depictions of locals riding horses overwhelmed by expansive converging grids and matrices of street maps and high-rises. While the city acquiesces to pernicious infrastructure-based economies, Aguinaldo observes and engages with local resistance from the city’s complex highland and lowland culture. Indigenous communities, other than the original native Ibaloi of metro-Baguio, and lowlanders have been moving in and out of the city in fleeting or drawn-out migrations.

Sabado’s portraits, on the other hand, offer a sentimentality about traditional knowledge transmission. In a way, there is a persistent reiteration of Cordilleran communal value systems. The artist has, over time and in his performance art, reflected on the spiritual body as an ecological warrior from a composite of teachings gathered since the 1980s from the personalities or culture-bearers he now honors here. In previous public performances, Sabado embodied the persona of the Ecowarrior, a sublime figure covered in orange mud and wearing a gas mask. The performance contends with the impending doom from ecological disaster, our botched relationship with the technological modern, needed radical social actions inspired by Indigenous systems, and the length of time that nature auto-heals from rapid anthropogenic catastrophes.

In his portraits, objects and scenes surround each of the subjects, building on the world where each operates. But the choice of elements also reveals Sabado’s learnings. He speaks of an artist who has introduced him to the medium of pen and ink, two Kalinga women leaders who have devoted their lives to sustaining Indigenous traditions, a mambunong who is a master in the Madmad ritual of the Ibaloi, an Indigenous impressionist artist who has for decades faithfully painted Ibaloi lifeways, and a mumbaki who taught him about Ifugao spirituality. Coming from his experience, Sabado implores the value of culture-bearers for the community’s youth.

Both artists situate their practice around cultural migrations within the Cordillera Region and its neighbors. The region has changed borders more recently over time under different political shades and agendas. In 1908, the American occupation separated the highland from the lowland. Later, in the post-war break-up that undid this separation, most of the highland part was left neglected by the state. The present borders were formed by a struggle for autonomy that was partly conceived right after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. This region of Indigenous peoples who have maintained resistance and distinctive communities since pre-colonial times is where both artists’ families have migrated to and integrated their lives. Aguinaldo was born and raised in Baguio City, and Sabado in the mining town of Lepanto in Mankayan, Benguet.

Each artist presents works that are informed by local indigenous relationalities profoundly scrutinized in the mid-1980s by the Baguio Arts Guild. The city, at that time, could be described as a regional art center when the words ‘art’ and ‘collective’ were beginning to be compounded locally. Sabado and Aguinaldo started as young members in the guild founded by artists like Santiago Bose, who espoused socially-engaged modalities in the guild festivals.

In the decades following, the practices of both artists have continued to engage local relationality, protest, belongingness, Baguio City’s pan-indigeneity, and their autobiographical and topographical placements in this history. They have consistently produced works that are unmistakably concerned with the visual culture of the region and the futures that are formed by incessantly seeing more than the sum of parts.

Words by Rocky Acofo Cajigan