Bulletin

Issue: November/December 2007

News

Cultural focus on Philippines

From left, PhD student Edwin Wise, Neil Fettling, Vince Alessi, and Dr Hogan

La Trobe University academics are helping strengthen what they regard as neglected links between Australia and the Philippines.

For five years the University has been a partner in the Philippines-Australia Studies Centre (PASC) with Ateneo de Manila University.

‘The Philippines are very relevant to Australia today with growing trade and security links in the region,’ says Head of PASC and Deputy Director of La Trobe’s Thesis Eleven Centre for Critical Theory, Dr Trevor Hogan.

This year the connections were extended with the launch of an undergraduate student exchange program. Two students from Ateneo attended La Trobe while two from here studied at Ateneo for one semester.

Dr Hogan says the currency of much exchange this year has been cultural.

Senior lecturer in Visual Arts and Design at the Mildura Campus, Neil Fettling, completed a three-month artist-in-residency at Ateneo. In October, on the main Melbourne campus at Bundoora, he gave a lecture on his experiences in Manila.

The PASC program also brings to Australia once a year the winner of that country’s National Young Artist Award. Nominations from 90 Filipino galleries are used to select the artist, who then exhibits at View Street Gallery in Bendigo, and visits the Bendigo, Mildura and Bundoora campuses as part of the fine arts program.

Neil Fettling says: ‘Manila teems with humanity and wrestles, more than many other global cities, with incongruous cultural hybridism, fervent Christianity, primordial animism and Spanish and American Imperialism.’

His residency was followed in June by a touring exhibition from the La Trobe Art Collection, My Country: Abstract Interpretations of The Australian Landscape. Described as the ‘first ofits kind in SE Asia,’ it was curated byVince Alessi, La Trobe Art MuseumDirector, and opened by the AustralianAmbassador to the Philippines.

The exhibition was part of a colloquium organised by the Thesis Eleven Centre and PASC at Ateneo de Manila University. I t brought together artists, theorists, philosophers, environmental historians, and sociologists to discuss the links between nature and society ‘at a time of crisis in our capacities to organise and develop sustainable forms of economic development.’

Dr Hogan says the Philippines is located at the ‘crossroads of the Asia Pacific, close to China, Taiwan and Japan, with strong western influences due to its history of Spanish and US colonisation’.

‘With such multi-cultural influences, Filipinos are in some ways similar to Australians in that they have a very responsive, reactive and at times humorous way of dealing with the world.’

In the social sciences, three La Trobe postgraduate students are currently working on research related to the Philippines and two Ateneo students are applying for doctoral scholarships to La Trobe.