Kim Alexis F.

Trasmontero STEM 12-31

Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan Awards (GAMABA)

AMBALANG AUSALIN

Textile Weaver, 2016 (born 4 March 1943)

By Earl Francis C. Pasilan

Apuh Ambalang, as she is called by her community of

weavers, is highly esteemed in all of Lamitan. Her skill is
deemed incomparable: she is able to bring forth all designs
and actualize all textile categories typical to the Yakan.
She can execute the suwah bekkat (cross-stitch-like
embellishment) and suwah pendan (embroidery-like
embellishment) techniques of the bunga sama category. She
possesses the complex knowledge of the entire weaving process, aware at the same time of
the cultural significance of each textile design or category. As a young girl, her mother,
who was the best weaver of her time, mentored Ambalang. She practiced with strips of
lugus and coconut leaves (mat-making material). Having learned from her mother the
expert, Ambalang, using the backstrap loom, started to weave all designs of the bunga
sama category, then took on the sinalu’an and the seputangan, two of the most intricate
categories in Yakan weaving. They are the most intricate since the former requires the use
of the minutest details of diamond or rhomboid designs, and the latter demands balance
and the filling up of all the spaces on the warp with pussuk labung and dinglu or mata-mata
patterns.

Secret in the comb

Ambalang, like other Yakan weavers, uses the back strap tension loom, which can be small
or large depending on the type of cloth or design to be woven.

The word ‘tennun’ in Yakan generally means woven cloth, and used in making the Yakan
dress. Yakan textiles are often mistakenly described as ‘embroidered’ by people not
familiar with the production process. There are different categories of a Yakan cloth.
Ambalang has mastered all these, although her artistry and craftsmanship are best
expressed in the bunga sama, sinalu’an, and seputangan.

Categories

She is also renowned for weaving the sinalu’an. This is a design or category of weave with
stripes of the diamond twill technique. The finished cloth is traditionally sewn as trousers
as well as upper wear. Under this category, Ambalang is best identified with the sinalu’an
teed, the most complicated of all Yakan woven textiles. Each of the stripes has an
elaborate pattern of very small diamonds and incised triangles resembling the sections of
bamboo. It has tiny bands of zigzags called kalis-kalis (incisions); minute diamonds called
bulak-bulak (flower-like); diminutive horizontal lines that separate the motifs into the
littlest segments resembling the sections of the bamboo called batak or honga, small bands
of diamonds inside the bulak-bulak called lepoq-lepoq; vertical rows of small dashes called
olet-olet, sipit-sipit, or lelipan-lelipan (caterpillar-like); rows of crab-like motifs called
kaka-kaka; a panel of jar-like motif called komboh-komboh; and the plain vertical lines or
columns called bettik (resembling the contour of the land when planting in straight lines).

The seputangan is her other exemplary specialty, as it was her mother’s too. This cloth is a
meter square in size with geometric designs, and is the most expensive part of the Yakan
female ensemble because of its detailed design. This piece of cloth is folded and tied over
the olos inalaman or olos pinalantupan to tighten the hold of the skirt around the waist. It
may also be worn as a head covering. To this day, it is placed on the shoulders of brides
and grooms during weddings. The pussuk labung (sawtooth), sipit–sipit or subid–subid (twill-
like), dawen–dawen (leaf-like), harren–harren (staircases), kabban–buddi
(diamonds/triangles), dinglu or mata (diamond/eye), and buwani–buwani (honeycomb-like)
designs are evident in this type of cloth that sets apart Ambalang’s creations from those
of other seputangan weavers.

Representative and realistic depictions

In Yakan weaving, most of the animal and plant motifs are realistically represented in
textiles. The Yakan value nature as the mother of art and in their weaving, record the pure
beauty of nature. The designs reflect the nature around Yakan customary habitation or
occupation as agriculturists, as each cloth patterning is symbolic of the palay, unhusked
rice, which also signals power, social status, and self-expression. The minuteness and
compressed detail of a motif or design symbolize the Yakan’s sense of “community,”
“togetherness,” or “harmony.” In the past, if a Yakan woman possessed the three great
skills of warping, designing, and weaving, and was able to produce a cloth, sew it, and make
a complete ensemble for her husband and children, she was regarded as an honorable
woman, wife, and mother, which is how Ambalang is acknowledged in the Yakan community.

Through her recollection of the earliest strategies and techniques learned from her
mother, Ambalang has started training Vilma, her daughter, and some of her nieces, in
whom she sees the continuity of her craft in future years, and the successful handover of
a heritage through generations of gifted weavers. For Ambalang to realize such artistry,
she has to be in harmony with her soul, her spirit ancestors, her environment, her tools,
her threads, her loom, and her Creator. The Yakan weaving complex engages the weaver
entirely, body and soul, and all the elements that surround her.

The tennun Yakan is an extraordinarily important manifestation of Yakan culture. Its

categories, colors, designs or motifs, and significance will constantly remind Ambalang, in
her outstanding handwork, what it means to be Yakan — people of the earth. Through her
craft, Ambalang as a’a pandey megtetennun (an expert weaver), affirms their identity as a
people who continuously weave the threads of culture, interlacing past, present, and,
hopefully, the future, in becoming a cultural treasure for the
new generation Yakan, for all Filipinos, and all humankind.

ESTELITA BANTILAN

Mat Weaver, 2016 (born 17 October 1940)

By Marian Pastor Roces

She was at birth, seventy-two years ago, Labnai Tumndan. It

was a recognizable name in the language, Blaan, spoken in the
montane hamlet of Mlasang. Her extended family reckoned
their place in relation to the mlasang, a tree that, once a
year, flowers profusely, sheds the inflorescences
immediately, and carpets abode and environment in magnificence all at once.

Mid-twentieth century in what are now the Mindanao provinces of Sarangani and South
Cotabato, Blaan speakers — also called Blaan, like their language — took on the slow
beginning of village life of some permanence. Their forebears had for centuries shifted
domiciles systematically to regenerate land cultivated to wild rice and yams. Around the
time of Labnai’s childhood, the small community understood their link to the Philippine
political system to be vested in the new identity of Mlasang as Upper Lasang, a barangay of
the municipality of Malapatan, in a province called Cotabato. Shortly after, this province
was subdivided and Malapatan was absorbed into the new province of Sarangani.

The child Labnai, already precocious in mat weaving, took on the name Estelita in the
1950s. Protestant pastors had installed themselves among her people, had commenced
fundamental social change. When Estelita married, becoming Mrs. Bantilan, she raised a
family in the foreign faith.

But she kept to her mat weaving. She persisted where other women could not because her
husband Tuwada was atypically supportive. Estelita also carried on because mats were her
gifts of choice to people she cherished. She was never wont to monetize her mats. She
carved out considerable time from domestic and farming responsibilities to accomplish
some of the biggest, most subtly beautiful mats to be seen anywhere in Southeast Asia
today. And, from the evidence of the mats she makes today, Estelita has continued to
cultivate a personal aesthetic through half a century.

“Princess”

In her old age, Estelita began to be called by a new nickname, Princess. The term of
endearment is spoken with the lightness of heart; also with genuine respect, especially
from the other mat weavers of Upper Lasang.

There are at least half a dozen women of the village whose elevated skills in the art of the
mat are recognized beyond even the Malapatan township. There are more who might have
applied themselves to the discipline had personal circumstances been more congenial to
taking up an art tradition that demands inordinate time and unusual powers of
concentration.

Among them, however, and their families, there is happy agreement around Estelita’s
superior gifts. Thus, their Princess: a worthy avatar of the entire community’s artistic
heritage. The Upper Lasang women present their Princess to visitors as their star artist.
They share the private joke and term of endearment — her princess-hood — as a fun part
of many other matters collectively construed, realized, remembered, practiced, and
celebrated.

Princess does not separate herself from the rest. While she knows she is good, there is
little about her disposition and body language to suggest an outsized sense of self. During
discussions, she recedes into the weavers’ group. At the end of any visit, she slips with
dispatch into a home as austere as the rest. Beside her is, nearly always, her husband
Tawada.
The art and the body

Like all mat weavers, Estelita’s entire body is her “loom.” The thin strips of the pandanus
romblon (Pandanus copelandii merr. Bariu) emerge matrixed through deft fingers
performing a personal rhythm, the beat seemingly guided by her eyes. The unwoven strips
are held taut at the other end of her body, as toes curl and close around, not only these
strips but, as it were, the abstraction that other people call design. The arc of her torso
determines the dexterity of feet and toes. Hand/eye coordination transpires within a
frame of milliseconds.

Estelita’s demeanor — characterized by alertness, focus, and a calm that appears to

permeate her entire body — is key to understanding mat weaving itself, among the
Sarangani Blaan and the rest of the Filipinos who still know the art. It is an exercise of
imagination within the parameters of a technology of making. The rigidity of the
parameters is precisely what the weaver works with to play with surprising variation and
compelling repetitiveness. To manage this maneuver between confinement and freedom,
any good weaver needs the focused energy Estelita abundantly demonstrates. Except that
in her case, a preternatural serenity appears to be the very source of genius.

Place

Upper Lasang is an interior zone barangay of Malapatan, which has a seaward orientation
like the rest of Sarangani, The vast Sarangani Bay is as though cupped by the mountains of
the province. Vistas of this big water dominate the experience of place to the Blaan of
these parts. They are called coastal Blaan — distinct from the Blaan of Koronadal and
Tampakan in South Cotabato who have a different dialectical variant of Blaan the language,
and markedly different clothing ensembles in the past. Estelita’s community of weavers,
now dependent on coconut plantings, were shifting agriculturists who exchanged
extensively with Maguindanao travelers and communities along the coastline.

A great many features of the Blaan clothing ensembles from a century ago, now residing in
museums and private collections, were objects of this exchange: notably, mother of pearl,
glass beads, cotton cloth, and threads. Metal musical instruments and horses were also
exchanged from Maguindanao traders with ikat-dyed cloth the Blaan made. The system
involved reciprocal relations between speakers of different languages living in mountains
vis-à-vis the coasts. Mats, too, figured in these relations in the past. Indeed Estelita’s
focus on mats as prize gifts for people she cares for is a residual aspect of ancient
reciprocation and exchange systems of island Southeast Asia.
In Upper Lasang, Estelita’s mathematical precision and aesthetic clarity found hospitable
ground in which to thrive. She lives among people who enjoy strong cultural recollection;
for instance, the use as dyestuff of the bark of the tree whose extravagant shedding of
inflorescence deserved its own descriptive, mlasang. It is a place where strong women, mat
weavers all, had the gumption to form themselves into a legal association to manage their
affairs and dealings with market. Upper Lasang is also
where a woman like Estelita can partner with a man
supportive of her art. Estelita is therefore right to take
the nickname “Princess” in stride, to not regard herself
separate from her milieu. She makes for a beautiful
Princess, in truth. But her remarkable artistic and personal
attribute is her ability to vanish into her community — even
as she shines out.

YABING MASALON DULO

Ikat Weaver, 2016 (born 8 August 1914)

By Marian Pastor Roces

Before, Yabing Dulo believes herself older than ninety. Her identity card marks that age,
however, and date of birth, the fourteenth of August supposedly 1910. Since the
venerable ikat-dyer has a memory sharper than blades, it seems always best to follow her
counsel. She does know for a fact that she was born in a place already called Landan in
that long ago time. The exact sitio was and is still named Amgu-o, a settlement of a few
related families within Landan, today a barangay, a constituent unit of a town. During the
early twentieth century, Amgu-o was a cluster of houses thoroughly unconnected to the
national political organization. It was a hilly, forested place where streams were
punctuated by all sizes of rocks. The trees, then, were ancient.

Now ancient as well — accepting the honorific Fu, elder, with no hauteur — Fu Yabing has
lived long enough to have seen Amgu-o emerge as an exposed, dry place sans those trees.
Her thatch-wood-concrete domicile speaks of a permanence unconnected to the archaic
system of shifting agriculture that gave its practitioners to move entire hamlets following
the obligation to regenerate soil after extended use; giving that land back to the forest.
Today, visitors reach Fu Yabing on foot, or by motorcycle, or a four-wheel drive vehicle
through pockmarked dirt passes; although it must be added, they are not overly daunted.
Landan is connected to the rest of the country by feeder roads, however flimsy, and
through the national political order, however tenuous in these parts.

It may indeed be suggested that it is Fu Yabing and her art that is unconnected to the
relevant order of things. They have been loosened free from their old coordinates in both
nature and culture. Living in radically different circumstances from her arboreal
birthplace, among a people who in that past engaged in precise reciprocal instead of
market relations, she carries on with an exquisite tradition that at present grafts poorly
with the cash economy. But she has always faced the disjunct between systems by
deploying her gift: the expert making of fine warp ikat textiles. With the GAMABA
(Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan) recognition, it is clear she has prevailed.

Ikat and the forests

Fu Yabing was born in an Amgu-o where the plant and animal life were differentiated to
minute degrees by the locals in the vocabulary of their tongue, Blaan. Among them, some
held encyclopedic lore — which none divided into seen and unseen reality, or science and
enchantment. The adepts knew their biology, climate, and geology invariably in relation to
states of being; knew their arts of transformation, not the least, wielding the pigmenting,
or toxic, or life-enhancing, or mysterious qualities of barks, roots, leaves, and strange
small petioles in various mixes in various preparations. Which is to say, the minutiae of life
in its many forms was saturated with meaning.

This much can be inferred from the extended literature on related cultures.
(Unfortunately, no substantive ethnography has been written on the Blaan to date.) The
warp ikat, lutáy textiles of the Blaan belong to a tradition common to the Bagobo, Blaan,
Tboli, Mandaya, and Mansaka (and to a lesser extent, to the Subanen) of Mindanao.
Moreover — although cotton is used because Musa textilis does not grow south of Sangir
and Talaud Islands — the technique is also shared with the Iban of Kalimantan, the Toraja
of Sulawesi, the Atoni and Tetum of both Timor Barat and East Timor, and the nearby
peoples of Sumba, Flores, and Roti of Nusa Tenggara Timur. These related ethnolinguistic
groups also shared a history of cultural formation amid thick forests. For all these
cultures, it was in this art-making that often conflicting divine forces were aligned,
equilibrium constructed, and human abilities given to serve the social order.

It was, most important for all these cultures, in the dyeing of lutáy warp threads, prior to
weaving, that an imagination at once mythic and scientific was sustained.

Although no longer. In Mindanao, the forests are for the most part an extinct form of
community. Among all the peoples who used to ikat in Mindanao, ikat is, for the most part,
an extinct form of art-making, community-making, equilibrium-making. And but for Fu
Yabing Dulo and only one or two others (one of whom is her daughter Lamena), Blaan ikat
dyeing is an extinct form of human endeavor in a world gone the way of the forests.

Arc of change

A settlement of about eighty households, Amgu-o today is tucked behind one of the
largest pineapple plantations in the world. Its operations began soon after Fu Yabing’s
birth, during the American colonial occupation of the Philippines. Mindanao was among the
United States’ lands “of promise” for industrialized agriculture. In the wake of this
aggressive project on this Philippine island, the Blaan were perforce marginalized in a
literal, geographic sense: they were one way or another thrust into small spaces left out of
industrial estates. The municipality of both plantation and fringes is Polomolok, an old
name; in a province called South Cotabato, a name circa the 1970s. Until then, Polomolok
was understood to be located in a vast province bigger than several U.S. states, which was
named for a stone fort built by Muslims, kuta batu, Cotabato.

Still, the radical social change had begun well before this latter-day period of conflict.
Christian evangelization transpired nearly simultaneously with the landing, like a spaceship,
of the plantation economy. The priests were Protestant Americans and a few married into
Blaan families, installing themselves as indigenous preachers. Later Blaan pastors were to
live in the U.S. Bible School was a regular experience since after the Second World War.

Artist and survivor

In this landscape of upheaval, Yabing Dulo and her late husband were among those who
kept to animism. She also kept to her own understanding of weaving quality. Indeed she
persisted with wild lutáy until these were no longer possible to acquire. Arjho Cariño
Turner, Fu Yabing’s grandniece and U.S.-resident wife of an American missionary, writes of
the precise period of shift: “Fu Yabing and her family own a farm in the valley called
Aksugok (in Amgu-o) where I and my family also lived when I was in elementary school. I
saw firsthand the kind of wild abaka she used. With the advent of [agricultural change],
some of those farms were converted to produce other crops and very few parent abaka
are growing wildly.”

Arjho herself has been more than a footnote in Fu Yabing’s extraordinary biography as
artist and survivor. It was with her assistance and the welcoming spirit of weaving
students in a nearby village of upland Blaan in Lamlifew, Malungon, Sarangani, that Fu
Yabing experienced full-time work as a mentor, even if only briefly. But it was because of
this stint that she traveled to Manila in 2009, to be part of an ASEAN Textile Symposium
at the National Museum of the Philippines. She has since been the focus of progressively
intensifying interest and adulation in her province and nationally.
That focus brings to greater clarity a person whose ikat-dyed fabrics bear stunning
similarity with museum-held Blaan pieces created more than a century ago; who allowed
supporters, primarily Arjho, to mightily devise ways for the market economy to link with
her art in respectful ways; and whose grit and quiet power verily intimidate all who meet
her into according her a dignified space in the tumult of today.

CHARACERISTICS OF THE FOLLOWING:

ABEL

- The abel is the traditional woven product of Vigan and the Ilocos region. The abel
cloth is known for being a strong, colorful material. The fabric is so strong and
beautiful that some families have them as heirlooms that last as long as their
antique furnishings. The abel is made from yarns of cotton or sagut that are
sourced from the many lands in northern Luzon that are dedicated to the growing
of this plant. After the cotton is harvested, it is prepared into yarns and dyed. The
different colored yarns are then arranged in a wooden handloom to create varied
and unique designs. The process is intricate and labor-intensive. Weavers must
master synchronizing the movements of their hands and feet to properly use the
wooden handloom.

PIS SYABIT

- Pis Siyabit or Pis Syabit is the prized handwoven cloth of the Tausugs of Sulu.
Usually used as head covering, it is made from cotton or silk, square in shape and
provided with geometric patterns. It can also be worn on the shoulder, knotted
around the hilt of the sword, or tied around the head among the Tausug men. Pis
Siyabit is usually seen being worn during weddings and other Tausug occasions as a
symbol of colorful history and rank. In modern times, pis siyabit is also used to
decorate households such as frames, curtains, and as giveaways.

T’NALAK

- T’nalak is a sacred cloth woven by the T'boli people in communities around Lake
Sebu, Mindanao island. Traditionally made by women of royal blood, thousands of
patterns that reference folklore and stories are known to the T’boli women by
memory. Fu Dalu, a spiritual guardian, guides t’nalak weaving, a process that is
enriched with taboo and ritual. T’nalak has a distinctive tri-colour scheme: White
for the pattern, red for relief elements and black (or deep brown) for the
 background. Fibres used in weaving are harvested from the abaca tree and
prepared in a process known as kedungon. Two metal blades are used to quickly
remove the pulp and reveal the filaments, which are worked by hand into fine
threads. During tembong, an artisan will connect individual threads end to end.
Temogo, or dyeing, is done in the ikat-style, using beeswax and natural pigments.
Fibres are first boiled in a black dye for several weeks. Weaving (mewel) is done on
a backstrap loom (legogong) and weaving one piece of cloth can take up to a month
of uninterrupted work. The final stage in the process, semaki, involves burnishing
the fabric with a cowrie shell that is heated by friction. Nut oil is used to condition
the fabric and add sheen. T’nalak is used for ritual purposes, as an offering to the
spirits and during festival celebrations. It is also exchanged between families for
food and supplies in the T'bolis’ barter economy, which endures to this day. Many
communities rely on the commercial sale of t’nalak to earn a living. For more
information and to support the T’boli weavers, visit One Weave.

MAT

- A mat is a piece of fabric material that generally is placed on a floor or other flat
surface. Mats serve a range of purposes including:
serving to clean items passed over it, such as a doormat, which removes dirt from
the soles of shoes, protecting that which is above the mat, such as a wrestling or
gymnastics mat, or an anti-vibration mat, protecting that which is beneath the mat,
such as a place mat or the matting used in archival framing and preservation of
documents and paintings, providing a regular or flat surface, such as a cushioned
computer mousepad

BAGOBO CLOTH

- The Bagobo traditionally live in the east and south sides of Mt. Apo and eastern
Cotabato, but now inhabit Davao. Their weaving tradition is tied to the magandi, a
dominant warrior class, identified by the red color of their clothing. Like the
Mandaya and the B’laan, the ikat is a prominent fixture in their textiles,
characterized with rhomb designs and curvilinear patterns. Some of the
recognizable motifs in their textiles include those inspired by the natural
environment: lightning, plants, stars, and human figures.