Panimulá

《Introduction》

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Tropikalye is an artist-led exercise in citizen-ethnography, its output structured as an online co-learning resource on vernacular culture in present-day Philippines. The resource, an online index containing documentations of folk strategies that respond to tropical and postcolonial conditions, is continually updated through content aggregation and submissions from its public. A shared interest in the “accidental intersections of aesthetics and the everyday” guides the process of accumulating vernacular wisdom—and humor, as it happens—that is otherwise overlooked. This interest also defines its study of contemporary Philippine aesthetics as one conducted from the vantage point of the street, “street” being a signifier for the gray area between indigenous territories and spaces maintained by institutions.

A portmanteau of the words “tropical” and the Tagalized Spanish “kalye”, the project implements a casual and convivial exchange of observations about the community by the community. Through this methodology, certain trends that arise from the index are mutually discovered, particularly our fondness for both the natural and the artificial, forming a basis for new vocabularies that express the socio-cultural significance of the vernacular.

The index has been online since its inception in 2018 in a design class taught by Nice Buenaventura at the Ateneo de Manila University. For the inaugural Benilde Open in 2024, Costantino Zicarelli joined the project as co-cultural actor.