Artistic multimedia installation in Milan features T’boli voices

MANILA, Philippines - Three generations of T’boli women will be the main feature of one of the dialogues with Alma Mater, Yuval Avital’s multimedia masterpiece at the La Fabbrica del Vapore from August 15 to 16.

“The Filipinos are a dramatic and unbelievable contemporary cultural rarity. On the one hand, they represent a great diversity of local identities, resulting from thousand-year traditions, emerging and developing on some seven thousand islands in the Pacific Ocean. On the other hand, they are one of the most remarkable migration phenomena of our time: people, often women and mothers forced to hide their differences, make themselves invisible, do anonymous service jobs, fulfilling the expectations of the society they live in,” Avital said.

Avital is an expert in Filipino traditions after having conducted several concerts as a classical guitarist in the Philippines. His interest in Philippine culture inspired him to feature the T’bolis in his Alma Mater installation currently ongoing until August 29.

Aside from the three generations of T’boli women – grandmother, a mother and a granddaughter, the event will also feature Filipino mothers and grandmothers residing in Italy.

The T’boli women will be featured in the center of the installation, in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s new interpretation of the infinity sign. Called the Third Paradise (Il Terzo Paradiso), arranged in three circles, three generations of the T’boli storytellers, representing those who still live in the original areas of their culture, share with the audience the fragments of their remote island’s vocal tradition, in multiple dialogues between past, present and future.

The Italian-based Filipino mothers and grandmothers on the other hand will move inside the installation, murmuring in the visitors’ ears the tales and songs handed down from generation to generation.

Besides the performance which will be held inside the main hall, a special program has been organized during the two-day event. A special presentation of Filipino festivals and dances will be performed and two special lectures will be held, one to be led by no other than the chair of the Philippine National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Dr. Felipe de Leon, Jr.

Through this special feature, Avital hopes to break the stereotype about the Filipino people. He wants to underline Filipino culture with its thousand-year-old traditions that survive notwithstanding the process of dispersal that Filipinos have faced for decades. He sees this dispersal, this diaspora, as a historic form of maternal sacrifice, made in the name of upcoming generations – a theme that truly resonates with his multimedia installation Alma Mater which literally means “nourishing mother.”

The heart of Alma Mater is a sound installation for 120 loudspeakers composed from fragments of traditional a-cappella female repertoire and women voices (chants, songs, prayers, lullabies, whispers, fairytales), focusing on voices of old women (grandmothers), coming from many parts of the world.

The two-day event was made in collaboration with the National Commission on Culture and the Arts and the Philippine Consulate General in Milan with the support of the Philippine Overseas Labor Office, Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, Philippine Social Security System and Pag-IBIG Fund.