Alimusan is fillet of big catfish sautéed in its natural oils to a tender sweetish fatness. It is served at Tinolahan Ubos sa Flyover at the North Terminal in Talisay, Bacolod City. He ate it with his children, in place of the regular breakfast at Nature’s Village Resort where the 2014 Visayan Islands Visual Arts Exhibit and Conferences (VIVA Excon) are held.
VIVA Excon is a biennale gathering of artists from all over the Philippines and the world. The biennale travels all over the Visayas having been held in Dumaguete, Tagbilaran, Calbayog, Iloilo and Cebu. But it was in Bacolod where it was born. And so it is always a historic moment when it returns here where it would be its fourth time.
And as before, this is the time to talk and interact with Bacolod artists Charlie Co, Dennis Ascalon, Nunelucio Alvarado, Manny Montelibano, and so many others whose non-mention here will have to be apologized for. But the VIVA Excon is also a gathering of names, some very big. Good for upcoming artists to see how they all feel and become equal as the event progresses. In the realest sense it is the culture of the visual arts in its most animated living form.
It takes a bit of time and effort to come here, of course. Part of the fun is the bus and boat ride, going down from Cebu to Toledo, crossing the Tañon Strait to San Carlos City, from there the ride through the foothills of Mount Canlaon, over endless sugarcane fields until they got here, him and his children.
The children are of course immediately intimidated; the father meeting old friends, all of them showing the outward signs of being hard-core artists of the Visayas, of VIVA, and then artists from Manila and abroad. They are all growing in years. Part of the reason the kids are here is the sure knowledge that one day, they might be the ones to come here, their father being absent for one abject reason or other.
VIVA is the turning of the years, the turning of culture, the crossing of it. Here, the Visayans find out what the artists of other places look like. Here also, where a visiting artists from somewhere else might see what the Visayan artists look like, the sound of their voices, what experiences they carry with them from their world.
VIVA is bigger than any one artist, bigger even than the artists of a particular city, or island, or country. Four or so many number days of exhibit openings and conferences will leave its mark on a person, a useful and pretty scar if you will. It is inevitable. For visiting artists, it provides the best panorama of the art done here. For local artists, it is the best doorway to the rest of the bigger world.
This year there was a lecture forum on curatorship by Dr. Reuben Cañete, Singaporean curator Joyce Toh, Japanese curator Keisuke Ozawa, and Dr. Patrick Flores, who curated VIVA’s curated show, “Lifeforce”. This show gathered young artists from all over the islands in a show which freely responded to the recent calamities which visited these parts of the world. The speakers expounded on their views of how shows are generally curated, what the curator is, how they choose which artists to include into a show.
The fact of curators is not generally well understood here where art shows are often done mostly for the purpose of selling the art works, which is not of course a bad thing all around. But the standard of art shows is slowly changing. It is not entirely a bad thing for artists to learn how to be relevant to shows as they are understood in the larger world. How to do this without losing integrity and identity?
VIVA is also a school of art. One gets a certificate in the end. One of these days, the certificate might have the same comparative weight of a university degree. It should.
There is no university degree to show you what catfish tastes like when it is cooked at a countryside bus terminal in Negros. The food was not in the menu at the hotel where VIVA was held. They had to search for it. Remembering how the late writer Edilberto Alegre told them that the best way to learn a particular culture is to taste what the culture eats, this food served at the wet markets and bus terminals where real people actually eat. By this he taught his children how they have to go beyond the VIVA itself to get the most of what VIVA really is. From there to learn to love it.
Alimusan is the name of the dish by which he and his children will remember this year’s VIVA Excon.