26/08/2026
With the Goethe-Institut Manila, headed by Julian Fuchs, and the writer-fellows of the WIP, we retraced the route of German traveller Fyodor Jagor through the Bikol region last May 2026!
Traveling together, living together, and visiting some of the sites Jagor himself encountered opened new ways of reading his late nineteenth-century text not only as a historical reference in the case of many Bikolnon and Filipino scholars but also as a site where epistemic violence is produced, carried forward, and later reckoned with in a postcolonial contexts.
What makes the experience especially enriching is seeing how these histories are turned over and transformed through our own creative practices. We are particularly interested in the works of Vic Loquias who is now doing a book on mountains and sprituality, Vince Imbat who is constellating his ideas around shallow and deep walkings, Hannah Leceña who is contempoating around the idea of the Catholic imagination as experienced in Bikol and her own region in Mindanao, and Kei Gemora on his poetics of the natural and political worlds with a volcano as a central trope and many other exciting provocations and insights from Mazlum and Jaya!
The journey has opened new areas of understanding between the personal and the lived worlds of others, between what is recorded and what is remembered, between the traveller's gaze and those who were being observed. So much discussion, so many questions, and so many new ways of seeing.
Savage Mind will continue to create spaces for this kind of engagement, where the itinerary becomes inquiry, the texts and creative praxis are weaved to life that is lived along the way.
