If you feel like having your usual joe in your usual coffee shop, why not try something different, a local brew for a change?
You can go to Barako Haus at the corner of Maria Cristina and Juana Osmeña streets (near Baseline). There, you can have your cup filled with fresh brew made from local beans such as the Batangas liberica for which the café is named. You get to sample local art as well, as the café hosts exhibit of Cebuano artists, starting with our group Mugna Sugbo’s exhibit entitled “Expressonism,” which opened last Friday night and will run until the end of July.
“Expressonism” might sound very apt for an exhibit held in a café. Good art is supposed to provide a strong kick even when taken in small doses, very much like the jolt of a good expresso. That is what the group thought in coming up with a title for this show.
And if it is spelled “expresso” the way it is in Europe, it is also not an accident. Artists had their initiation to expresso culture when they had a month-long exhibit and residency in Paris in 2013.
In fact, it is that trip that binds this group. We are artists of different styles and persuasions, but what brought us together is the shared experience of traveling to a different country, sharing room and studio as we made art in no less than the art capital of the world.
Artists are notorious for being difficult to organize. It’s hard enough to deal with different personalities, and artists can be the most unpredictable types. They can be extremely sensitive yet also vocal.
Well, our group is no different. We suck at meetings. In fact, almost all of us in the group forgot about the exhibit we planned not so long ago until the night before the opening when we were already supposed to hang our paintings. But we managed to somehow arrive, although a bit late, and put up our artworks.
I told our group president, Palmy Pe-Tudtud, that we shouldn’t take our group too seriously as we all tend to be easily exasperated with organizational work. Instead, we can start to think of Mugna Sugbo more like a barkada rather than an organization of artists. In other words, we can meet only when the opportunity or need to have a show arises. We don’t need to be bound by a year-long program or plan. After all, this is a group that was founded on a common lifetime experience. That is assurance enough for a more lasting bond.
Here in Cebu, the name “Mugna” (which is Cebuano for “creation” or “work”) admittedly sounds cliché when used for anything that has to do with creativity. In fact, there had been other groups named such not only in Cebu but in neighboring provinces as well. This is why we had to attach Sugbo to our name.
The truth is, we did not plan to call ourselves Mugna. It began when we were required by French sponsors to come up with a title for our exhibit in Paris, as we would be representing Cebu in the “12×12” international art festival held in that city in September 2013.
We decided to leave the French audience with a Cebuano word to remember by. So we chose “mugna.” It might sound cliché here in Cebu but there in Europe it had an exotic appeal. And, indeed, it stuck. The French liked it so they started calling us the Mugna group from Cebu. It was used in the posters and the brochures of our exhibit. We had no choice but to live up to the name, which was accidentally given.
So, since we came back, our group had been working with partners and friends in France as Mugna Sugbo to conduct not only exhibits but also community-oriented activities. Among them were the art therapy workshops and donation campaigns we did for victims of the earthquake in Bohol and supertyphoon Yolanda here in Cebu in 2014.
These experiences of using art to provide solace to disaster victims proved to be beneficial not only to the victims but to each of us, psychologically, and even to our group’s collective soul as well.
Our travel experience has made it imperative to share our insights to fellow artists and the Cebuano audience through our work. But that rare experience of being able to take advantage of our connections abroad to raise funds to help disaster victims here at home strengthened our sense of mission and gave our group a moral perspective. That is perhaps the real “work” behind Mugna Sugbo.