On the eve of GOH 2025

My wife Neni Sta. Romana Cruz has been kept busy as member of the Organizing Team for the Philippines as Guest of Honour in 2025 at the Frankfurter Buchmesse and she writes from Frankfurt:

The five-day Frankfurter Buchmesse was a rehearsal of sorts for the Philippine delegation of 70+ authors, publishers, editors, translators as the country gears up for its turn as Guest of Honour (GOH) in 2025. It was an eye-opening experience with many important conversations and translation contracts made. The Asia Stage organized and sponsored by Dominador Buhain of Rex Publishing and the Frankfurter Buchmesse was a successful venue as a forum on current issues among writers from different countries. The Philippine delegation was given the opportunity to be part of meaningful interactions with flying colors.

A tradition at the Buchmesse happens as the fair closes in what is known as the Handover Ceremony when the current GOH country Italy formally passes on the title to the next. It is a collaboration between the two countries and so it began with the insightful exchange on stage between two prominent illustrators, Alessandro Sanna and Isabel Roxas.

There was an impressive brief cultural show (the ceremony took all of an hour) which featured chants from tribal singer, chanter Waway Saway from Bukidnon.

What brought the house down was the award-winning, world renowned Madrigal Singers singing an age-old, universally known and loved “Volare” that got the pleasantly surprised Italians singing along.

An important part of the ceremony which the Philippine team preferred to call “Endings and Beginnings” is the symbolic handing over of the commemorative Guest Scroll on which is recorded all of the previous GOH countries’ specific quotes significant to the country. Italy handed this over to Ambassador Natividad who announced in her speech in behalf of Senator Legarda, “The Philippines is ready to take flight on the wings of imagination.”

We were only given a limited word count of over a hundred words but we are pleased with our final choices after much deliberation, as these lines capture the history and the diversity of our oral and literary tradition, from the ambahan to the darangen to the tanaga to Francisco Balagtas to Jose Rizal’s “Ang wika ang pag-iisip ng bayan.” All the quotations were in their original languages.

At ceremony’s end, there was much jubilation and in typical Philippine fashion, much kodakan. And even the Buchmesse emcee announced, “This is how Handover Ceremonies should be…”

Special credit for this seamless production again – as it was during the press conference to announce to German journalists the launch of the Philippines for GOH 2025 – is the NCCA team led by Riya Brigino Lopez and peerless curator, Patrick Flores. How they made all of us Filipinos stand tall and proud.

Very little is known about the Philippines in the world, aside from the political and natural disasters that have been our fate in recent years, so this was a huge opportunity to show off what the Filipino is all about.

Itwas regrettable that Senator Loren Legarda, the project visionary and our patroness of the arts, could not be physically present because of her legislative duties and, as she mentioned in her remarks read for her by head of the Philippine delegation Philippine Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany Irene Susan Natividad, “I stayed behind, bound by legislative duties that safeguard continuous and sustainable support from the government for culture and creativity. But my support is fully with you and our mission in Frankfurt.” That was reassuring enough for all of us gearing up for the once in a lifetime opportunity to showcase the Philippine publishing industry to the world.

It was in 2015 when Sen. Loren, then approached by Karina Bolasco who was encouraged by the return of the Philippines to the Venice Biennale through the senator’s efforts, began to support the NBDB delegation to make a yearly presence at the Buchmesse. Indonesia was GOH in 2015, the very first Southeast Asian country to be so honored, and the senator dreamt big what she thought was possible – the Philippines should likewise vie for that distinction. Without her challenge and her consistent support, we would not be where we are today, literally on the eve of being Guest of Honour.

This gigantic endeavor initiated, led and generously supported by the Office of Senator Legarda would not make any headway at all without the participation of partner agencies like the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the National Book Development Board, the Department of Foreign Affairs.

The opening ceremony with Italy as Guest of Honour left us with the enduring last line of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “The love that moves the sun and the other stars.” We are left with similar lines to ponder at the finale event of In the Air, the Heidelberg launch of the Philippines as Guest of Honour in 2025. A tertulia on Dr. Jose Rizal by foreign scholars on Rizal which was synthesized by poet, fictionist, translator, cultural maven Kristian Sendon Cordero, inspired by a motto of a local church: “In Rizal and with him, we shall gather again next year as we continue to imagine ourselves as people who are ‘inheritors of the past, protagonists of the present and fashioners of a beautiful future.’”

How we need these words to carry us through October 2025 and beyond.