“Gongs. Smoke. Blood. Earth.”

“Gongs. Smoke. Blood. Earth.” mapped the spiritual topography of Baguio—a major city in the Cordillera Administrative Region of the Philippines that began as a hill station in 1900 during American colonization—through an array of artworks from the collective Baguio Arts Guild. Founded in 1987, the guild has actively organized grassroots activities and incorporated local engagement into its practice, launching the first Baguio Arts Festival in 1989. A central pillar of the guild’s philosophy is the term indio-genius, coined by Kidlat Tahimik, one of the guild’s original members and a key figure in Filipino Third Cinema, who drew inspiration from a malapropism of an Ifugao chief who persistently mispronounced indigenous. The concept is embodied in the installation Dap-ay Cineplex 2: Ifugao Typhoon-Goddess (Inhabian) Resists the Kultur Invasion by the Wind-Goddess of Hollywood (Marilyn), 2025. In it, Kidlat reframes the dap-ay—a Cordilleran stone-seat ceremonial ring where elders hold meetings, share knowledge, and perform rituals—as a tense yet witty mise-en-scène, in which wood-carved Ifugao deities battle against Hollywood’s imperial forces led by Marilyn Monroe. The uplifting ethos of indio-genius echoes as well in Tommy Hafalla’s black-and-white images. A lifetime advocate for Cordilleran ethnolinguistic groups such as the Ifugao, Kankanaey, and Kalinga, Hafalla puts his analog photography in service to communities and intimately portrays their cultures. A horizontal strip of images, Study Print, 1986–2011, which ranges from daily activities at home to rituals performed at sacred sites, unfurls not only different groups’ spiritual practice but also how they have ingeniously adapted aspects of their traditions to modernity.

Younger members of the guild maintain the spirit of indio-genius. Expanding on the oeuvre of his father Kidlat and his teacher, late guild member Santiago Bose, Kawayan de Guia has reenacted his mentors’ dap-ay, but with a twist. Dap-Ay: Reflected Dialogues (A Baguio Unarchive), 2017, takes the form of a ceremonial ground, where viewers can gather and sit on papier-mâché and resin “stones.” The paper here comes from torn pages of the guild’s book Tiw-Tiwong: An Uncyclopedia to Life, Living, and Art in Baguio, the Cordilleras, and beyond (2023): Utilizing the cultural knowledge amassed in the pages as raw materials for this interactive installation, Kawayan not only pays homage to his ancestors, but also highlights the continuous circulation of creative strategies among the guild artists. This sharing of ideas also manifests in artist Gail Vicente’s textile installation Earth Song (Mother the Earth), 2025, a reenactment of a project by late guild member Roberto Villanueva. Overcome with grief after his mother’s passing in 1994, Villanueva invited all the mothers that he knew to send him handkerchiefs, which he wove into a metaphoric umbilical cord; he then mounted it on the wall in a circular shape. The project remained unfinished when Villanueva died of cancer in 1995, and Vicente, a new mother herself, decided to reenact his installation using a combination of donated handkerchiefs and secondhand textiles to fulfill his wish. Vicente’s work is a celebration of Villanueva’s communally based legacy and of the spirit of kapwa—an ancient Filipino way of life, where one sees the self as inclusive of others.

In addition to their internal unpacking of the guild’s history, the artists in the show also expounded the cultural context and lived reality of the city of Baguio. Nona Garcia’s ceiling-high painting Building Mountains, 2023, presents an abstract rendering of a catastrophe: What at first appear to be peaceful mountains are piles of gravel, alluding to the unchecked construction and urbanization that is swallowing the region’s majestic nature, which brings tourism to the city. Meanwhile, Rocky Cajigan presented the complexity of growing up Indigenous in the Cordilleras through a self-portrait installation with a hanging cassock (Catholicism), a salt block (trade history), and hair (maternal lineage). Woven together, these works from the guild’s multigenerational artists not only activate Baguio’s collective knowledge, but also foreground the lived experience of diverse Cordilleran Indigenous communities so as to shatter exoticizing stereotypes.