Maze of installations at Tam-awan Village

ITS name means "lookout point." And it is, in more

ways than one.

Tam-awan, an artists’ village put up by everyone’s

favorite artist Ben Cabrera (Bencab to many) in the

outskirts of Baguio City, provides a vantage point

where you may view and embrace the artistic

temperament of the mountain hideaway.

There seems to be various ways to get there as there

are winding roads in Baguio, but the idea is to traverse

the alternative road going to La Trinidad Valley, the

route which offers breathtaking mountain slopes and

ravines, and not the citified highway proper which jeepneys take. Some 15

minutes from the city proper, just as the road swerves into a sweeping "U"

bend, there you’ll find Tam-awan. There’s a signage, and bamboo steps that

lead you up the village.

It’s basically hilly terrain dotted with traditional huts. At the first landing is the

coffee shop, which also serves as the main office, the kitchen, the dining room

and gift shop.

Beside it is the art gallery, an intimate space which you may enter as long as

you leave your footwear outside the door. Below the gallery is a working

room where I espied what looked like a computer, although I may have been

mistaken, breathless as I was with excitement.

The other huts in the village are in the traditional Cordillera style, long-limbed

and snug, graceful with their long posts and homey in their cozy, woodsy

comforts on the framed landing above. These traditional huts are for rent, and

come with their own sanitary toilets a spitting distance away. (The

board-and-lodging arrangements are very reasonable, if you’re not too picky.

Perfect for adventurous honeymooners.)

On our first visit there, the chatty woman who showed us around the place

insisted we go through the maze of on-site installations spread out all over the

landscape. There were frenzied stone formations, papier mache eggs cradled

on a giant nest, a fish pond swaddled with a fish net. There was John Frank

Sabado’s witty web of dreams. There even was a labyrinth made by a visiting

Japanese artist; it was constructed out of bamboo sticks and pages of

Japanese newspapers: you wedge yourself in, wade through the tunnel of

paper walls and come out in another part of the hill.

What I liked the most, though, was a solitary bench at a precipitous

promontory, which lops off into a sheer fall down the road. The bench wasn’t

an installation, of course, just part of the village’s facilities. Even as the bench

dangled the threat of a mortal fall, it also offered solace and serenity. It was a

gift of space, a space one can claim one’s own and yet a space that

nonetheless goes beyond the immediacy of the moment and hurtles you into

other landscapes—a haphazard mountain range of memories and possibilities.

And energies.

This is what Tam-awan is about, to soak in the spirit of the place, to be

rooted, to sail with the wind, to find one’s moorings, to recharge one’s

creative energies, to string up various experiences into a meaningful whole, to

become, to just be.

I thought of performance artist Rene Aquitania giving away his gigantic plastic

canvases to dazed survivors of the big earthquake in 1990 so they could use

them as sheltering see-through "tents." Of Robert Villanueva assembling his

startling installation maze at the grounds of the Cultural Center of the

Philippines. Of filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik and his "Mababangong

Bangungot" and how we planted pine tree saplings at the spot where the

kiosk once stood on top of Wright Park. Of Ballet Philippines performing the

"Igorot" suite during the Baguio Arts Festival. Of writer Chit

Balmaceda-Gutierrez shivering with us at Camp John Hay with dear, dear

Marian Catedral. Of flirtation walk and kissing rock and boxes of dried

mangoes sent via LBC.

One needs a vantage point with which to allow art to breathe, to grow, to

become. In one way or another, Tam-awan is such a lookout point.

"This has been a long-time dream," Bencab explained Tam-awan to us during

our next visit, when we caught him there facilitating sessions for teachers from

the Philippine High School for the Arts. "And here, now, we live that dream."

[ Teachers Camp Wiki ]