Philippine haute design and grassroots focus win Gold at the Zaragoza World Expo

[Sharing with you a bit of good news from Marian Roces, a confrere in Pagbabago@Pilipinas. - Bong]

Philippine haute design and grassroots focus win Gold at the Zaragoza World Expo

The Philippine Pavilion was awarded the Gold Prize for design and clarity of the design's link with the theme of the Zaragoza 2008 World World Expo: Water and Sustainable Development. Designed by Architect Ed Calma from a concept by veteran curator Marian Pastor Roces, the Pavilion brings together the usually disparate worlds of haute design and grassroots efforts.

The award comes after three months of enthusiastic reception enjoyed by the Pavilion from the Expo visitors, mostly from European nations. The Pavilion has been a crowd d rawer, pulling in thousands for its surprising combination of haute design and presentation of grassroots water management initiatives in this archipelagic nation.

The pavilion design is a blue-lit space with hundreds of transparent spheres suspended from the high ceiling. Figures in bone china and embroidered translucent cloth appear luminous in the darkened pavilion.

This Gold Prize is the second of an unprecedented winning streak created for the Department of Tourism by the partnering of Lor Calma Design Associates as the lead of the Pavilion design team, with the museum development company TAOINC of Pastor Roces. The same collaboration brought about the Gold Prize for the Philippine Pavilion at the 2006 World Expo i n Aichi, Japan.

It is the design experience immediately seemed to "magically" bring the visitor to the Pavilion's main message for Zaragoza. The Philippines meant to draw attention to the historical power of its community-based environmentalism. The 30-year old phenomenon of an active civil society has produced hundreds of water-resource conservation and management projects that have proven sustainable because almost all are operated by local people. Each sphere in the pavilion makes reference to one of hundreds of such "people-power" projects.

This blend of global sensibility and local sensitivity has been a hallmark of modern Philippine culture.

At Expo Zaragoza, the Philippines indicates the survival of an ancient Pacific Island sense of equality that has re-shapedo or indigenized Spanish and American cultural ideas. This egalitarian spirit is very palpable in a pavilion that literally shows the light emanating from the work of the most ordinary of Filipinos.

As part of Pastor Roces' curatorial plan for the Pavilion, former DENR Secretary Elisea "Bebet" Gozun and environmentalist Dr. Nereus Acosta were invited to Zaragoza to contribute key ideas to the Tribuna del Agua, a series of fora amongst the scientists and civil society groups of the world, discussing responses to impending global water crises. The Tribuna organizers committed to including Gozun's and Acosta's ideas in the forthcoming "Zaragoza Let ter," a moral call for the sustainable use of the world's water resources.