THE good news is, even if it seems like she has championed arts and culture for forever, Sen. Loren Legarda has just been designated chairperson of the Senate Committee on Culture and the Arts in the 20th Congress—a committee which, believe it or not, has only been in existence since 2022.
“Arts and culture generate potential opportunities for development deserving of our utmost respect, protection, and promotion,” Legarda said in a statement, decrying the impression people have that these fields are “disconnected from the realities of daily life and economic survival.”
Legarda in exclusive interview with TheDiarist.ph: ‘Culture and the arts are directly linked sa bituka.’ (Photo by Alya B. Honasan)
“No, I don’t believe that at all,” she insists. “Culture and the arts are directly linked sa bituka (stomach). What will the weavers eat if we don’t help them? What will we teach children in schools if they don’t understand our environment, our mountains? What is Philippine culture without the over 15 million indigenous peoples and their culture? It’s identity, pagkakilanlan. Hindi siya kultura lang (It’s not only culture). Hindi nila-lang-lang ang kultura (You don’t say ‘only’ when it’s culture).”
Legarda at the last Frankfurt Book Fair, where she pushed for the Philippines to be Guest of Honour this year (Courtesy of Sen. Loren Legarda office)
Checking out the children’s books in Frankfurt (Courtesy of Sen. Loren Legarda office)
The bad news: It’s apparently a committee without its budget, which was deleted from this year’s appropriations, so Legarda is subsisting on last year’s resources. Even the funds for the much-anticipated Philippine Guest of Honour participation in the 2025 Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse, or FBM)) on October 14–19, which Legarda had done the serious legwork for, has disappeared. “Well, you may have deleted the budget,” she declares, obviously addressing whoever were behind such machinations, “but you cannot delete me, or my advocacy and my work for the Filipino people.”
Legarda, a fourth-term senator who was first elected in 1998 (she topped the election then, and is now the longest-serving female senator in the house), and is serving until 2028, literally walks the talk. She arrives for this interview in a plain white T-shirt worn with a patadyong skirt, a woven bracelet, and a found object necklace, carrying a sudsud grass bag made by the Tagolwanen weavers of Bukidnon. She also has a well-documented history of pushing arts and culture legislation, such as Republic Act No. 10066, or the National Cultural Heritage Act of 2009, which provides for the protection and conservation of the country’s cultural heritage, and RA 10908, the Integrated History Act of 2016, mandating the inclusion of Filipino-Muslim and Indigenous Peoples’ history, culture, and identity in the study of Philippine history.
Among the Aeta of Mindoro for her TV magazine show ‘PEP Talk’ in the 1980s (Courtesy of Loren Legarda office)
It wasn’t an overnight thing, she says of this interest in indigenous tribes, which must have developed when she was in her 20s. Her assistant Kathleen shares vintage pictures of her boss—“ang payat-payat ko, I must have been 90 lbs”—among the Aeta of Zambales, whom she visited for her award-winning television lifestyle show, PEP (People, Events and Places) Talk, which aired from 1986 to 1990, winning Legarda a 1988 PMPC Star Award for Best Magazine Show Host.
“From the Cordilleras to the mountains of Bukidnon to the mountains of Antique, I have projects which not many know exist, maybe hundreds.”
The farthest community that she has worked with? “Maybe Tawi-Tawi, because I support their tutup.” Legarda talks a mile a minute, and in a few seconds, Kathleen has produced an online photograph of the tutup, a colorful food cover made of pandan leaves that is often mistaken for a hat.
“For me, everything and everyone who needs help, who have the interest and the talent and the knowledge systems that must be preserved, I help. If they have something to say, something to show, something to preserve. As long as it’s a person, an individual, a community willing to share their know-how. And so you give them a little capital, some tools, some exposure, though I don’t touch their designs.”
‘For me, everything and everyone who needs help, who have the interest and the talent and the knowledge systems that must be preserved, I help’
With artist Mark Salvatus and curator Carlos Quijon at the vernissage of the Philippine Pavilion at the Biennale de Venezia, April 2024 (photo courtesy of the Philippine Arts in Venice FB page)
In 2022, two of Legarda’s advocacies unintentionally overlapped, when Sammy Buhle, a young artisanal weaver from Ifugao Province, became part of that year’s Philippine Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, “Andi Taku e Sana, Amung Taku di Sana”/”All of us present, This is our gathering,” an ingenious multi-media presentation using sound, field recordings, textiles, indigenous weaving practices, and performative notation through video.
It is well known that the contemporary Philippine art scene would not have representation at the prestigious international art event today if Legarda had not brought it up in 2013, during budget hearings with art and culture agencies. The country was last represented in Venice in 1964 by eventual National Artists Napoleon Abueva and Jose Joya, but it never happened again—until 51 years later.
Legarda recalls how it took two years for the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) to complete the application. Funds were available, Legarda recalls—until Yolanda happened, and all the money had to be funneled towards post-disaster rehabilitation. Still, she pushed on, and from May 9 to Nov. 22, 2015, the Philippines participated in the 56th Venice Biennale with Tie A String Around The World, featuring the film Genghis Khan by National Artists Manuel Conde and Carlos Francisco, restored for the occasion; artist Jose Tence Ruiz’s installation, Shoal; and filmmaker Manny Montelibano’s video work, A Dashed State.
“People were saying maybe it’s ningas-cogon, but my ambition was high,” Legarda says. “Even if we only had a small room, it was beautifully curated by Patrick Flores. And the artists were chosen through a very democratic, very transparent process.”
Several contemporary artists and architects have since flown the Philippine flag at the Biennale. Legarda says her patronage is a mere continuation of her own early exposure to contemporary art, having been raised an “arts brat,” thanks to her late mother, the amiable Bessie Legarda, who had been friends with the likes of art giants Vicente Manansala and H.R. Ocampo. “I would join her in visiting Mang Enteng on weekends in Binangonan, and we would bring sinigang, adobo, homemade from Malabon. I would also accompany Mama to the homes of Ibarra de la Rosa in Manila, and H.R. Ocampo in Sangandaan. Galicano and Sym Mendoza would come to the house on Sundays, asking her to help them sell their paintings.”
In fact, in 1981, when Legarda graduated from the University of the Philippines’ then Institute of Mass Communications, her thesis was a content analysis of Manansala’s paintings during the martial law years—which earned her a flat 1.0. Oh, and as if she wasn’t busy enough, Loren also paints, but maybe that’s another story.
Her other “baby,” the FBM, the largest international trade fair for the book publishing industry, was yet another debacle, Legarda recalls. The country’s National Book Development Board (NBDB) first participated in 1998, and the Philippines was last present in 2000. In 2015, after NBDB board member and then Director of Ateneo De Manila University Press Karina Bolasco sought her help for that year’s event, Legarda went to check the fair out, and wondered why Indonesia could be a Guest of Honor, and not the Philippines. By 2017, after hosting FBM president and CEO Juergen Boos in Manila, Legarda was pushing for the submission of the Philippines’ Letter of Intent to become Guest of Honor. Every time organizers told her there was a line, Legarda replied, “We’ll wait.”
By 2017, Legarda was pushing for the submission of the Philippines’ Letter of Intent to become Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Every time organizers told her there was a line, Legarda replied, ‘We’ll wait’
The country’s proposal was approved in 2023, and again, despite the budget for Philippine participation disappearing into thin air, things are all set for the country’s 2,000-sqm booth and extensive participation in October.
As a fascinating side development in Germany, Legarda delivered, in December 2024, a Foreign Policy address at the DFA. She spoke of her visit to Wilhelmsfeld in 2019, where she met Dr. Fritz Hack Ullmer, whose great-grandfather, Pastor Karl Ullmer, hosted Jose Rizal for three months in 1886. Inside Pastor Ullmer’s Protestant vicarage, Rizal wrote the final chapters of Noli Me Tangere; a statue of Rizal actually stands in the municipality. “Recently, I learned that this historic vicarage was being placed on the market,” she said in the address. “Knowing its importance to us Filipinos, I am delighted to share that this site…will soon belong to the Philippines.” Yet again, however, budgetary constraints have upended the acquisition—but knowing Legarda, the woman will find a way.
Legarda is hitting the ground running with her committee. “I’m happy, as it gives me another platform to do the work I’ve been doing for decades. It brings to focus both legislation and policies on one side, and on the other, actual programs, activities, events, and projects that can make people understand the importance of culture and the arts—that they bring about sustainable livelihoods, and actually provide employment and jobs.
“Arts and culture express to us and to the world our identity as Filipinos,” she continues. “I cannot imagine a Philippines, for example, without understanding our more than 100 ethnolinguistic groups; without seeing the difference, let’s say, between the Cordillera peoples and the T’Bolis of South Cotabato, or the Panay-Bukidnon. There’s so much to understand, not just in the weaves, but in the languages they speak, the culinary heritage, the rituals.”
‘How can you treasure what you do not measure?’
The bulk of the work, she notes, has been in documenting, with the NCCA, what she calls schools of living tradition (SLT), and giving assistance to Filipino artisans. “We find out what else are the SLTs in the provinces, in far-flung barangays, whether hinterlands or coastal areas, where there are groups who continue to do their crafts.”
Legarda had also authored and served as principal sponsor of RA 11961 (an amendment to RA 10066), “An Act Strengthening the Conservation and Protection of Philippine Cultural Heritage through Cultural Mapping and Enhanced Cultural Heritage Education Program.” In fact, cultural mapping is at the top of her committee’s to-do list.
How would she define culture mapping? “It is the research, study, documentation, writing, photographing, and understanding of everything that we do. I’m simplifying it. Mapping or documenting plants and herbs, the stories of our elders, heritage structures, flora and fauna. Ano ang laman ng bundok? Anong klaseng mga bato? Anong klaseng mga bulaklak na endemic na dun lang nahahanap? Ano ang istorya ng mga lola? Ano ang nakatayo dyan dati na ngayon ay wala na?
“So, when we map, when we find out what’s around us, both tangible and intangible, we have a better understanding of ourselves. And when we have a better understanding of ourselves, we have pride. We had a wealth of culture. We were never just indios, as the colonizers would say.”
The mapping is a job she will help barangays in 82 provinces and 1,600 plus cities and municipalities to do. Ambitious, indeed, but as Legarda says, “How can you treasure what you do not measure? How do you protect what you don’t know exists?”
And then, unexpectedly, genuinely, tears start to fall from Loren Legarda’s eyes—perhaps, a momentary realization of what’s at stake, and the national pride that she takes very seriously. “How can you be proud of something you don’t know you have? Because when we Filipinos realize the wealth of our natural resources, the importance of who we are as a people—then we will not allow others to look down on us.”
