Voicing The Ancestral Sacred: Grace Nono and Ensemble

The Philippine islands—home to hundreds of ethnolinguistic groups and subgroups with cultural links to other Southeast Asian peoples—have ancestral sonic landscapes emanating from the continual acts of relations, exchange, conflict, negotiation, and celebration, between humans, ancestral spirits, earth deities, animals, birds, winds, rivers, as well as other constitutive elements of creation. These sonic worlds, however, have become increasingly silenced over the last six hundred years. With the arrival of Islam in the 14th century, Iberian Catholicism in the 15th century, American Protestantism, rapid industrialization, and contemporary globalization in the 20th century, came the gradual receding of these ancestral sounds and voices.

Today, a growing number of younger generation Filipinos and Filipino descendants both in the homeland and in the diaspora are rediscovering and revisiting what remains of these ancestral sonic landscapes. They are reclaiming these voices’ sacredness as points of communion between ancestors and offspring, and between peoples from different ancestries coming together in the spirit of dialogue and mutual respect.

In Voicing the Ancestral Sacred, we witness a gathering of ancestrally-informed voices from selected areas in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao (the Philippines’ three island clusters); indigenous, Muslim, and Christian populations; hinterland, rural and urban communities. Fragments of these sonic landscapes will be re-contextualized within a new urban landscape. We invite you to listen, as well as break open the walls of your ears, hearts, and minds.

Makinig. Pamati. Listen.

In conjunction with the exhibition Philippine Gold: Treasures of Forgotten Kingdoms, on view September 11, 2015 through January 3, 2016.

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