𝗔𝗿𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗱𝗴𝗲 Showcasing art imagined from the very margins of the nation, Mindanao Art 2024 blooms from the edges The theme of this year’s fair, ‘art on the edge,’ puts the spotlight on the empowering beauty of creative expression as it emerges from the peripheries. Mindanao has long suffered neglect, and yet despite this marginalization it remains one of the most culturally vibrant islands in Asia.

Its creatives produce art far from the center of a nation which relegates culture and the arts to the margins. Mindanawon artists not only struggle against being far from the cultural center, they also have to deal with the general Filipino disregard for creativity. All that on top of the endemic challenges of their home island: conflict, calamity, and a lack of resources. But it is these very struggles which make Mindanao art all the more poignant – we are an island that has received so little, but can create so much. And the art we produce is steeped in spirit, deeply rooted in community, and organic to the lives of our people.

The central image of this year’s fair is not just a flower, it is a visualization of blooming. We imagine our art as flowers in florescence on remote cliff-sides – not merely ornamental (for nobody gets to see them there), but blooming because that is the very nature of flowers, to blossom. And by blossoming in the wasteland, the flower makes the wasteland bloom Mindanao Art celebrates not only the inalienable glory of the artist in bloom, but their transformative power to assert the identities of their communities before the universe, and to make their people unfurl their potential.

More importantly, the fair compels Mindanao and Filipino public to realize that our conventional notions of growth (the fulfilment of our basic needs) no longer suffice. It is time we start pursuing our destinies, realizing our potentials, and living lives worth living. Because if we are to truly say we are living, mere survival is not enough. We must bloom. Another central image of this year’s fair is the bamboo. Mindanao Art asserts the centrality of culture as a pillar for national development. All the other pillars – economic progress, technological advancement, military security, – can only be achieved if we have a strong pillar. And we do not imagine this pillar as a single rigid colonial column. We imagine it as but an endless grove of indigenous imaginations, whose invisible rhizomes cross the rivers and mountains of Mindanao to emerge as shoots that break the earth of comfort and complacency, refusing to remain buried away.

These myriad and diverse bamboo pillars together keep the imagined community standing, malleable to the winds of time but never snapping, ever growing, ever reaching out with native vigor towards ever higher skies. Mindanao has long been considered a frontier.

Now we have become the forefront, doing art well beyond the studio or the gallery and out into the very ends of the world. We have been relegated to the edges. And because of that, 𝑤𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑑𝑔𝑒.