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The Philippine Agencies Today for Tomorrow

For contemporary arts class, we were assigned to work in groups and do a presentation about one of the different agencies in the Philippines, namely the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Cultural Center of the Philippines, National Historical Commission of the Philippines, National Museum of the Philippines, National Library of the Philippines, National Archives of the Philippines, and Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino. From what I can recall during the presentation, these agencies served its individual purpose in supporting the Philippine’s arts and culture. They sounded rather important especially since the Philippine government, too, wants to help keep our nation’s arts alive.

As the Philippines is growing and developing for a brighter and prosperous future (hopefully), there might be a point where the people may forget about their past, their rich and diverse culture. Meaning to say that as people of the Philippines are moving forward, I am in hope that they don’t leave their past behind. So, I don’t think any of these are considerably irrelevant and unimportant, because at the end of the day when you look at the purpose of these agencies, they are there to take a stand in the preservation, development and promotion of some of the many aspects of the Philippines’ arts and culture.

If I was given the chance to an agency that would similarly preserve the Philippine arts in such a way, it’d be called "TINTA". In Tagalog, it means "ink", but TINTA would also stand for "The Treasured Institution of the National Tattooing Arts". It would play a role in reviving and supporting the art of Filipino tribal tattoos as well as taking in account to the modernization of tattooing that we see nowadays. I feel like the Filipino society has stigma associated with stigma. Amongst most Filipinos, it seen to be taboo. Many tattooed people may be perceived as to be more negative and deviant compared to people without tattoos. In which I find that there is irony in that not because tattoos play a role in Filipino tribal culture and history, but because the Philippines is progressing, society appears to have left that behind. That is why I proposed TINTA, to save that ancient art. An example of the various projects that it would conceive would be INKCON, an annual convention that promotes the Filipino tattoo arts, as well as have various activities from viewing booths from tattoo parlors to getting actual tattoos.

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