Dunâ sa Duta: Art, uprooted lives, and the struggle for land

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By Ted Aldwin Ong

What are we without the land? Who are we without our motherland?

For the communities of Pulo Maestra Vita and Abilay Sur in Oton, Iloilo, these are not merely philosophical questions — they are lived realities. Inch by inch, the steady advance of real estate and commercial development has pushed them to the margins of lands their families have called home for generations, turning identity, belonging, and survival into everyday struggles.

This issue has brought artists together for PANGAMOT, a fundraising exhibition showcasing works that highlight the plight of land-dispossessed communities and express resistance against aggressive development forces, including those associated with the powerful Villar family.

Organized by Kikik Kollektive in partnership with the Ogtonganon Visual Artist League, PANGAMOT at Balay Sueño in Jaro brought together 45 artists, many of whom are also cultural workers, heritage preservation advocates, academics, environmentalists, and activists, alongside art collectives and youth groups. They are united in supporting KADUNAAN, a folk art gathering slated for May.

Reconnecting community and land

The idea of KADUNAAN emerged from a meaningful conversation between Kikik Kollektive’s Master Weaver Marrz Capanang, Designer for Communal Experiences Kristine Buenavista, and members of OVAL during a visit to the OVAL Art Gallery. This initial discussion grew into a deeper communal reflection on the relationship between people and the land.

“There, we sat under the shade of a sarisa tree (also known as aratiles or datiles), looking up as birds passed overhead while discussing issues that affect our lives,” shared Marites Eusoya, a community leader and one of OVAL’s founders.

“We recognize that the growth of development and career-oriented education has produced generations of professionals, leaving fewer people who appreciate land cultivation as a central part of life. Yet we also understand how vital the land remains to our survival,” said Eusoya.

“KADUNAAN is a way of reliving our folklore, our ways of life, and our shared community culture,” added Eusoya, and “invites us to renew our appreciation for the land and soil — as the source of both our food and the materials we use in our art, like the clay we shape into sculptures. More than that, it calls us to revisit how we care for the land, and how we continue to cultivate and propagate plants and fruit-bearing trees.”

“Kadunaan” comes from the Hiligaynon word “dunâ,” which means “innate” or “inherent,” and the event aims to harness what is inherent in the community. It will be a convergence of farmers, mud and bamboo builders, community cooks, storytellers, and compositors whose daily lives depend on the land, people whose hands are in constant interaction with the soil and the elements that grow from it and nurture them. It will serve as a venue for them to share their struggles and challenges in the face of rapid land conversion and the expanding acquisition of their agricultural land by influential capitalists such as the Villars.

The event will be a communion rooted in deep ecology — what is “dunâ sa duta” (inherent to the land) — and will highlight Filipino spirituality, rural wisdom, and a collective remembering of what is truly essential.

Hands that tend, shape, and sustain

The PANGAMOT exhibition celebrates the power of hands to create, shape, and open new possibilities.

“Our hands are not just tools,” explained Kristine Buenavista. “They are extensions of intention, memory, and care. They trace patterns in the air, in clay, in bamboo, in earth, and in the hearts of the people we touch.”

Every gesture, Buenavista describes, carries a quiet insistence: the world can be more than it seems. Through effort, imagination, and love, new worlds can be made possible.

In Hiligaynon, “pangamot” literally means “to use the hands,” but it runs deeper than that. It is tending and contributing. “To tend is to notice, to pay attention, to lean into the pulse of life and community. To contribute, on the other hand, is not just to offer; it is to enter a web of reciprocity and interdependence. Every act, whether shaping a clay sculpture, planting a seed, or sharing a song, is a conversation with the living world, a reminder that nothing grows alone,” stressed Buenavista.

Notable environmental lawyer Tony Oposa expounds on the relationship between land and humans as “an intricate web of interdependence,” where humans are not the weavers but merely strands in the web of life. In this view, land ownership is temporary and must be exercised in ways that sustain life, echoing Aldo Leopold’s concept of “land ethics.”

In Barangay Abilay Sur, this connection with the land is alive and visible, maintaining peace and stability. Generations have cultivated soil, tended plants and vegetable gardens, propagated fruit trees, and shaped something into forms that carry history, culture, aspirations, and hope. Every touch of the earth is both creation and care, a responsibility that persists even as modern development and professional ambitions draw many away from cultivation.

Art and resistance

PANGAMOT serves as both a conversation starter and a call for solidarity with OVAL. The artworks intentionally avoid direct critiques of landlessness, explicit condemnation of the Villars and those associated with their development agenda, or overt calls for resistance. Instead, they reflect the Ilonggo temperament of nonconfrontational protest, emphasizing resilience, reflection, and quiet assertion rather than open denunciation.

By exploring the ideas of pangamot and kadunaan, viewers are invited to reflect on the intertwined human and ecological relationships that shape rural life, as well as the contested nature of land ownership, exemplified by the Villar family’s Vista Land township, which now spans roughly 500 hectares across Pavia, San Miguel, and Oton towns.

The venue adds a compelling dimension to the exhibition. Once the 1940s ancestral home of Don Modesto Ledesma, a prominent haciendero and politician, the house was later acquired by the Espinosa family — figures influential in politics, business, and the arts — who restored it and reopened it in 2018 as Balay Sueño (House of Dreams). As a symbol of wealth and authority rooted in the hacienda system, the house provides a striking contrast to the exhibition’s themes and, allegorically, reflects the elite structures that continue to hold sway while sustaining artistic patronage.

For viewers attuned to the dynamics of class and power, the tension between theme and setting becomes discernible as the house shifts from a symbol of ownership into a space of reflection — one where histories of authority and possession are interrogated and confronted, and where, in the present, the voices of the land-dispossessed communities — conveyed through art — are given their due presence.

As pangamot reminds us, it is more than an act of making; it is an embodied practice of tending and weaving, guided by attentiveness, care, and responsibility. From this perspective, we return to the essential questions rooted in the lived realities of Abilay Sur communities: What are we without the land, and who are we without our motherland?

Fittingly, what becomes of us when even our small plots are taken away in the name of business and profit — whether by the Villars or other powerful families?