Layers of Ilonggo Reality

Mobility, dignity

Today’s middle- and working-class homes, smaller and more modest, reflect lifestyle conditions of a majority of Iloilo City residents. Instead of projecting stability and gentility as the old mansions once did, the aura of the middle-class neighborhood is mobility, dignity, work and a strong sense of community.

Unlike the genteel streets of the moneyed class where nobody is seen outside of their fenced gardens, streets in middle- and working-class districts fill with everyday life. Residents live their lives on the street.

The local barangay hall spills out into the street, bringing governance to the people level, as it were. The street is where men hang out, drink or play basketball tournaments. The street is a social center, where the overflow of guests at a neighborhood christening, wedding or funeral is seated.

On the other hand, the rural landscape, dotted with bahay-kubo clustered in barrios and agricultural land, tells another story. To Filipinos, the bahay-kubo are generic, and the Ilonggo house is no exception. But the high level of outstanding bamboo craftsmanship sets the humble Ilonggo kubo far above the typical and generic.

For many generations, Ilonggo craftsmen embroider not with needle and thread but with bamboo. Their bamboo work achieves a play of texture by mixing peeled and unpeeled strips or combining dyed and natural-colored strips handwoven into repeating diamond patterns for the “lowly” sawali matting.

Bamboo sections are scored, flattened and framed for wall panels. They are cut into slats for above-the-ground flooring and stripped into ribbons thin enough for weaving. Absolutely amazing are bamboo slat patterns, grilles of most delicately plaited bamboo lacework executed in fine, hand-embroidery quality.

Ilonggo architectural bamboo craftsmanship, totally unknown and unappreciated, is naïf Ilonggo folk art at its finest.

Iloilo bamboo houses, solid but fragile, enclosed but transparent, embody the observation that the Philippine bahay-kubo is in essence a “basket for living.”

source: http://showbizandstyle.inquirer.net/