FOR some three or four days, the city of Tagum was the open-field venue of cultures, displayed and gazed at. The National Council for Culture and the Arts partnering with the local government of Tagum City hosted a gathering of several ethnic communities, labeled as IP or Indigenous Peoples, from October 6 to 10 this year.

Even as culture is really lived—how we breathe and how we manage our breathing and talk about it is as cultural as when the breathing is brought into the realm of playing the nose flute—there is a part of culture that is seen or manifested. The colors of cultures are really not the color wheel that we know but the variation and splendor of what the people in the ethnic communities can do with nature around them.

Art as we know it, as in that European invention of techne or skills, does not readily exist in the villages or communities of the so-called indigenous peoples. As in that question about who are the indigenous peoples, then what is this thing called folk, ethnic or indigenous art?

Does the man who wears the shirt with triangles and other shapes interpreted as having meanings wearing an art piece? Does the artist who weaves the mat merely skillful or artistic? Is the artisan in fact an artist?

These are old debates but then nothing is old when cultures get displayed because a central government feels those from the margin should be heard and/or seen.

The question of art reached its peak in that gathering when women and men wore those clothing made of textiles that are identified with a particular “tribe” or community.

The T’boli weaver from Lake Sebu discussed with us the different colorations on the fiber being spun. While she admitted to us that dyes made from chemicals are already in use, she distinguished in terms of price those fibers gaining hues from dyes extracted from plants and their roots and leaves and those works that come to life through chemicals. The young weaver, her age assuring us that the tradition would go on, also shared one fact: foreign buyers prefer pieces that are dyed following the old traditional processes.

We looked at her and, for all the discomfort that we felt seeing her in the backstrap loom, we knew also that she would remain “the other.” We knew that we came from cultures where women used machines and, when they do weave, they would never sit still for two hours, their legs stretched out.

Around the E-Park (Energy Park) were vernacular houses and booths. What we could see on the bodies of women and men were on the walls of some of the booths. This created a kind of artistic double-vision, a warping of the realness of bodily arts as consumed and of the same artifacts now raised on the level of things to be looked at and marveled at. And purchased.

One interesting aspect of the exhibition was the result of exigencies and management: The massive calendar of events proved difficult for some ethnic communities so much so that they did not have time to place labels. The result was a display that was familiar to those who owned—wore/use/play with/produce/consume—them. The museologist and the curator were nowhere; the quotidian was everywhere.

On a white wall, for example, hung lifeless and now “artistic” the different blouses from different ethnic communities.

Was that a Mansaka design, the dagmay or abaca cloth articulated with human forms and the laron na opat or crocodile forms?

A blouse in black and red appeared dramatic, with sharp triangles in a rigid pattern forming a bright diamond-like sheen. Would the original wearer also recognize the drama in those details? Up on the wall, the designs were now bereft of human touch. Only the eyes appreciated them for what they are, a vestment so cognitively detached from the central and imperial center’s notion of elegance and fashionable.

But the designs also can win you over for their being different. Would the “othering” appeal to us who are appreciated for being dominantly, even in illusion, homogenous and changed? Where would the colonial be in this discourse?

The weaver from Lake Sebu tells us that they get the designs from a dream or from a dreamer. The B’laan says the designs are given to the dreamer after a dance or ritual to the l’nilong or fairies. But then again, the weaver in that booth confided to us that when they weave, they can just consult a catalog made by the dreamweavers. Did I hear her right? Or, would I like that they continue conjuring a dream first, and then the design later, instead of having a ready dialogue? Am I imposing my categories?

A grand display of mats was found in another booth. The Sama of Sulu are noted for their designs on the mats, some of them heirlooms, softened by years and use. The colors again are not the colors that we find in the city palette. Nature and the sea have participated in the coloration of these home artifacts.

There are ethnic communities out there in the South who use the mats for ritualistic purposes. A mat for the Mansaka of Davao, for example, can define a sacred space. In the booth I visited, the mats were transformed into envelope and clutch bags. What took place? What did this transformation bring about?

Negotiated, deconstructed, theorized about, searched for the social structures that support them, were the arts and cultures of ethnic communities that we commit as belonging to time and space that we could visit but never fully comprehend. The romance in this engagement is art itself. The viewing is an endeavor that shifts the meaning of artifacts even as they retain the public spheres of cultures. The lines between the sacred and the secular, the elevated and the regular are no more blurred than made fluid and interchangeable.

The Energy Park in Barangay Apokon in Tagum City, Davao del Norte, was the main site of “Dayaw: Indigenous Peoples Festival 2011.” The event was spearheaded by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, particularly its Subcommission on Cultural Communities and Traditional Arts, with the Mindanawon Initiatives for Cultural Dialogue, the Tagum City government, the Tagum City Tourism Council, different government agencies and cultural councils.