Kamarin Art Gallery, Naga City's newest art and culture haven

How does it feel, personally? How long have you been working on this? What are you most excited about in this new chapter of Naga's art and culture scene?

KSC: We configured Kamarin as a kind of multi-purpose space so we do our activities here now like book launchings, film screenings, small performances and art exhibitions. We slowly built it in between lockdowns and some financial setbacks on April 2021 up to April 2022, but these extraordinary situations did not deter us from accomplishing something that we have always wanted—an expansion that will provide a new sense of space, a kind of structure that honours the arts and the artists through our curation, art education, and community engagements.

While we are located in Naga and we are slowly building and solidifying our networks among schools and the local business communities, I guess Savage Mind/Kamarin is setting a new model of art space for small college cities in the Philippines and we’d like to proceed by entering into more cross-regional and cultural engagements. This is also to ensure that Bicol or Naga will not have the same kind of insularity that is toxic and patronising. We are excited to open our art stores and a special section on art studies and Philippine art inside the Kamarin and hopefully, we can send our resident artists to other creative communities in the country and abroad by 2024 we hope we can open our art residency program as well.

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How would you describe the art and culture scene of Bicol prior to your establishment of this gallery?

KSC: I think with Kamarin, we get a new kind of aspiration that hopefully will also challenge our local artists, particularly the young and emerging talents to do art that is open to professional criticism, collaborations, and continuing education and training which by way of Kamarin we hope to provide.

The art and cultural scene in the region has been struggling for some kind of ‘national’ recognition, which is why many artists still think of malls as the best avenue for our art exhibitions. Kamarin would like to provide an alternative space where individual talent and artistic vision are to be celebrated. With Savage Mind and Kamarin, we hope to solidify this kind of engagement. On a personal note, I have observed that some artists here in Bicol tend to paint and draw the same images and symbols of Peñafrancia and Mayon since this seems to be accessible and marketable. We’d like to change this by posing a challenge to our artists to consider looking for other symbols and images that reckon and question our notions of personal and collective identities and to some extent to even question our notion of arts and cultures.

What propelled you to put up this art space? What do you aim to achieve?

KSC: On July 20, 2020, in a national paper, the bookshop was hailed as the creative heart of Naga City, and we took it with a sense of pride and gratitude and at the same time as a new kind of inspiration to intensify our artistic and community engagements, particularly with the emerging filmmakers, visual artists, theatre actors, and with our teachers and students in Naga and in other parts of Bicol. The journalist Howie Severino who has been one of our constant supporters has called this space, ‘a soul of community’ and we’d like to live up to the challenge given to us by these references.

We hope that with Kamarin, we will be able to put a permanent special collection of some of the works of the artist Venancio Igarta entrusted to us by the poet Luis Cabalquinto who also gave us his personal archives, which include many important materials like extremely rare Filipiniana and Bikoliana collections. To honour this friendship and generosity, we have opened a special room in the bookshop dedicated to the works of Cabalquinto who is one, if not, our most important Filipino poet in the United States after Jose Garcia Villa. I’m particularly excited to share with you that at the moment we are transcribing a series of tape recordings of Cabalquinto’s interviews with the artist David Medalla. In time we hope to put this to a public exhibition. We are also equally excited to do a documentary film on several sculptural works of the indigenous communities, the Agta in Buhi, this coming April 2023 and we can only be grateful to Stephen Acabado, PhD, from the University of California in Los Angeles for co-producing this film project.

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Are there hurdles you've faced before putting this plan to fruition? Have you had any hesitation? What inspired you to continue on?

KSC: One can always cite the lack of public support especially the local government as some kind of a de-facto answer, right? But let me not go there. Truth be told, we don’t mind collaborating with political leaders and academic and business establishments in order to advance a particular agenda that will benefit our art communities—and I think this kind of radical openness for collaborations has been used against us by people who think they are morally superior to us. If I were still in my young and insecure self, this would certainly affect my disposition, but at the moment, I am now seeing it as a reaction to the many fruits we have accomplished since we built Savage Mind in 2018. And to see that the number of gallery visitors is increasing compatible with the number of books being sold and distributed, and the outpouring of support from teachers and students to participate in our book and art festivals, we can only be inspired to always think, and create new opportunities and programs that will make us worthy to be called, the creative heart, a soul of the community.

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What do you think about the contemporary art scene's status in the country, especially in the digital age proliferated by TikTok, augmented reality, NFT/crypto art market, etc?

KSC: We have to continue decentralising and decolonizing our art spaces, and the same can be said about the books and films and music that we produce, and with the digital age hovering over us, we can take advantage of this technology to advance and produce a critical body of knowledge that sees art not as a commodity but as a medium of the same ideas that put to question boundaries and bodies of knowledge that have long been positioned to perpetuate the same kind of thinking that sees the regions as less-worthy, less-articulate and less-rigorous. We’d like our emerging artists to get into this digital technology and integrate them into their art processes and let us listen and learn from these ‘digital natives’. For the regional art and academic centres and creative communities, I believe it is time to engage with each other and learn from each other’s best practices.

What can your gallery add or improve in the promotion of the arts? How will your curatorial approach be?

KSC: Kamarin is set to venture into new art programs and with our annual Bikol Book Festival and the year-end art festival, Saeculum, held every December, in time for the season of Advent and longer nights, we’d like to invite more poets, artists, filmmakers, musicians from other parts of the Philippines to share with us their own respective art processes. Having been identified as a writer and filmmaker from the Bicol region, I have met writers and filmmakers from other parts of the country who are resolute and rigorous in their own artistic process and we’d like to have them come to Kamarin and share with us their stories and their arts. We hope to bring artists from the indigenous communities in the North as well as from the Visayas and Mindanao and learn from them. This is how we will grow as a community and not by closing ranks but by opening our arms to each other. Savage Mind is not for small minds—we have to continue paving this road for cross-regional collaborations and for our initial engagements we are moving around the ideas of education, environment and ecumenism—these themes I personally drafted to be the cornerstones of our art education and exhibition.

As to curation, we have Tito Genova Valiente as our resident art critic, Tito is also a film critic and an anthropologist and a very keen mind who has been one of our trustees. We have also extended invitations to other critics and art curators, like Patrick Flores, Oscar Campomanes, Aprille Tijam, Rolando Tolentino, Katrina Stuart Santiago among others to help us in the coming years as we present emerging and established artists.

Will you be representing established and emerging artists from the Bicol region only? Please tell us briefly about the artists whose works you are showcasing.

KSC: We plan to provide a sort of homecoming, a return to origins to some of the established artists like Gus Albor who has recently opened his first solo exhibition in the city of his birth (He was born in Naga, and spent his early childhood years here) and for us, the experience of bringing Gus back to Kamarin has brought us so many insights on the kind of work that we want to do, but more than this, we are grateful as we get the chance to establish a new friendship with the very modest Gus. At the moment, we also plan to do a retrospective with Romeo and Rox Lee, Edgar Doctor and Roger San Miguel and even with Sagay-based artist Nune Alvarado whose mother is from Ligao, Albay. With the emerging artists, we have John Sherwin Acampado who also co-manages our bookshop and the gallery and Ryan Cuatrona, Xavier Roncesvalles, Cocoi Base, Rustom Pujado, Mavreen and Aldrin Camacho and with them, we plan to organise a young artists group whose works we will use for book illustrations and designs. We are happy to note that one of our artists, Panch Alvarez whose first solo exhibition was held in Kamarin last March 2022, is now getting ready for his first foreign art residency in Bellagio, Italy. His book, An Apartment in Naga, which contains his flash fiction and gothic illustrations is to appear in its Czech translation this year.

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What kind of experience do you hope art lovers get out of when entering Kamarin Art Gallery?

KSC: This creative heart of Naga City has three areas to explore, the Savage Mind Bookshop, which has the Cabalquinto and Igarta Room, the Tugawe Cove Café where one gets to see our special book exhibitions (copies of The Little Prince in various foreign and local editions, we have a Bikol translation) and the Kamarin Art Gallery that has been a venue for many artistic events including a film screening and theatrical production. Outside, one sees a quote from the poet William Blake, "May God keep us from a single vision". I’d like people to see that in this quote, we want them to experience the beauty and splendour of the Savage Mind, the kind of mind that listens to our polyphonic voices and gazes and touches and probes into our realities, with the sense of the manifold, stored and shared in our little Kamarin in Naga.

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