Sang ang Bulawan Waay na Gin-Ayag was an invitation to take a second look at the wedding band on your ring finger, the object through which we most intimately encounter bulawan (gold). As a bodily adornment, it evokes the vena amoris, while its circular form serves as a reminder of eternal love, fidelity, unity, and commitment.

Kikik Kollektive, however, urges us to look beyond these familiar associations and reconsider what we think we already know about gold—not merely as an adornment, a commodity, or a symbol of wealth and longevity, but as a material entwined with narratives of communal land and labor, colonial legacies of extraction, and inherited systems of belief that continue to shape contemporary life.

The theme marks the latest chapter in their sustained critical practice, one that repeatedly returns to historical, political, and social fault lines to reopen the past not as a settled narrative but as a field of inquiry where contradictions and contestations remain productive. Through the intersecting realms of myth, folklore, memory, and material culture, the collective rearticulates history in ways that make possible new realizations and new ways of knowing.

The corpus exemplifies this sustained artistic inquiry, demonstrating how the collective continually expands the possibilities of critical artistic practice through activism. Earlier works confronted China’s incursions into the West Philippine Sea, exposed the displacements of corporate development on the ancestral lands of communities in Pulo Maestra Vita and Abilay Sur in Oton, Iloilo, and reactivated the spectral presence of the Don Celso Ledesma Mansion by adorning the exterior walls of the Beaux-Arts heritage landmark with a wheatpaste mural. That intervention reframed the building as a vestige of the political and economic power, social hierarchies, and shared aspirations forged by the colonial sugar economy of Panay and Negros—an economic order sustained by unequal land ownership, extractive labor relations, and concentrated wealth at the turn of the twentieth century.

Translated from Hiligaynon as When the Gold Was No Longer Sifted, the theme takes shape through the many meanings of the word ayag. As the word changes form—alayagon, pag-ayag, gin-ayag, and naayag—it expands beyond literal significations to conjure acts of sifting, revealing, becoming clear, and radiating—building on these meanings to explore uncovering, transformation, and the emergence of value.

Among these, pag-ayag refers to the traditional practice of gold panning in riverbeds, where flowing water and gravity separate heavier minerals from sand and gravel. Variations of this labor-intensive practice remain evident in places such as San Remigio, Antique, where local residents recover semi-precious stones from alluvial river deposits. This activity continues to sustain the local gemstone craft industry through the production of gemstone trees. Widely believed to attract good luck and prosperity, these handcrafted objects reflect deep-rooted connections between the community, local beliefs, and the natural resources of its river systems.

Revisit previous article: Kikik Kollektive Makes a Stand at Art for Everyone 2025

Through the curatorial proposition of Marrz Capanang and the text of Kristine Buenavista, the works of 20 artists unfold through ayag as both method and metaphor. Like precious fragments separated from river sediments, each work participates in the careful labor of surfacing long-concealed cultural legacies that once shaped life around gold but have been obscured by colonial histories and modern regimes of extraction.

Beginning with the opening panel’s handwritten poem layered over gold leaf in Buenavista’s Pan/Pawn, the exhibition enters into interlocution between artwork and text, tracing two modes of encounter: gold as a material sustained through intimate relationships with the natural environment, and gold as a resource transformed by industrial systems that have progressively severed communities from the places that once sustained them. Pivoting between two closely related words whose meanings diverge sharply, the collage condenses centuries of economic and social transformation; one term invoking livelihood and community life, the other collateral, debt, and dispossession, revealing how systems of exchange reshape relationships between land, labor, and material.

Within this historical shift, Buenavista’s curatorial text anchors the exhibition’s central inquiry in the act of ayag: discerning what has been obscured and asking what remains to be brought into view. As she writes:

“Long before gold became currency, it held the light of the earth and mirrored the spirit within us. Sang ang Bulawan Waay na Gin-Ayag asks a deeper question: Who does gold belong to?”

Drawing on National Artist for Literature Resil Mojares’ discussion of the ancient Visayan concept of the “Object-Soul,” the collection recalls a cosmology in which material things possessed an inner life rather than existing as inert objects. Because of its resistance to corrosion, gold became more than a durable metal; it served as a vessel for the sacred, mediating relationships among the living, the dead, and the natural world. This symbolic role is reflected in funerary objects such as the Oton Gold Death Mask, suggesting gold’s entanglement with beliefs surrounding death and the passage to the afterlife, where its value lay not merely in its rarity or beauty but in the meanings communities invested in it.

Against this worldview, colonization emerges as a decisive rupture. More than political conquest, it transformed relationships between people, land, and material as reciprocity yielded to extraction and stewardship to accumulation. The consequences of that rupture continue to shape contemporary struggles over land, natural resources, and the authority to determine their value.

I encountered one such struggle 25 years ago on the island of Pan de Azucar, off the coast of Concepcion in northern Iloilo, where a proposed mining project had become the center of a deeply divisive community debate. I joined local residents in organizing communities and providing paralegal support after a Mineral Production Sharing Agreement had been approved between a Filipino mining company and its foreign partner. What initially appeared to be a dispute over economic development gradually revealed itself as a conflict between fundamentally different understandings of land and value. For some, the mineral deposits beneath the island promised employment and economic opportunity. For others, they threatened forests, farms, fishing grounds, and a way of life sustained across generations. More significantly, they exposed unequal authority over who could determine the future of the island and the worth of what lay beneath it.

As residents came to understand the environmental consequences of mining, we organized petitions, attended public consultations, and challenged the project before the government. When drilling operations were suspended in late 2001, many believed that collective action had prevailed. The reprieve, as I had expected however, proved temporary. Exploration resumed the following year after company assessments confirmed commercially viable deposits of zinc, copper, silver, and gold beneath their feet. It became evident that the conflict had never been solely about whether mining would proceed, but about who possessed the authority to define the value of the land and decide its future.

Community assemblies gradually evolved into heated conversations that extended beyond environmental advocacy. Elders, fisherfolk, farmers, church leaders, and young people wrestled with questions that no environmental impact assessment could adequately answer. What is gold? If it lies beneath ancestral land, who has the authority to decide its fate? Who ultimately benefits from its extraction? As these questions surfaced, differences that had long coexisted within the community hardened into competing visions of the island’s future. Families found themselves divided, trust became increasingly fragile, and the prospect of violence drew closer. Long before a single ounce of gold was extracted, its anticipated value had already begun to reshape the social landscape, revealing that gold derives its power not only from its material presence but from the competing meanings, claims, and relationships invested in it.

In hindsight, I recognize these as the very questions that animate Sang ang Bulawan Waay na Gin-Ayag—an inquiry into how gold moves between the sacred and the political, revealing its many lives across history and culture. As a threshold and rupture, the exhibition creates a space for confronting the enduring consequences of colonial extraction while reopening ways of understanding gold beyond its material value. It is from this vantage that Arjun Appadurai’s notion of the “social life of things” and Igor Kopytoff’s concept of the “cultural biography” of objects become especially illuminating, offering a language for understanding how the same material can move between sacred inheritance, colonial spoil, economic resource, political instrument, and cultural memory.

Viewed through this lens, the works do not seek to define gold so much as following its passage through different lives and relationships. Memory, inheritance, sacredness, and adornments emerge as recurring motifs.

In Colyn Therese Paciente’s What Gold Remembers, memory appears to adhere to the material itself, as though the flat sheet of gold carries traces of every life it has touched. Gold is connotated not as an inert object but as a repository of lived experience. Patrick Jamora’s Two Gold Earrings reimagines ornament as a vessel of kinship. Enlarged earrings become repositories of overlapping and cascading words—memories, qualities, and fragments of language that remind the artist of their bearer—transforming the ornament into a material archive of affection, family history, and continuity across generations.

Marrz Capanang’s Candido Iban: Ginsisid ang Gabanaag extends this cultural biography into the political sphere by recalling the revolutionary martyr from Capiz. Here, gold becomes an allegorical instrument that financed an uprising, bearing witness to sacrifice and resistance. Its value resides not in its material worth alone but in the historical memory, political agency, and collective aspirations it came to embody.

Likewise operating as allegories are Ken Cadenas’s Sa Kaugatan ang Bulawan and Charles Franco’s Salakot kag Manangyad, Baylo sa Aton Katawhan. The former shifts gold from an external object of possession to an internal embodiment of identity, proposing it as a constitutive element of cultural belonging. The latter, meanwhile, appears to draw upon the legend of the Golden Salakot and the oral tradition of the Barter of Panay, where gold functions less as a commodity than as a medium of exchange through which kinship, alliance, and precolonial relations acquire social and cultural meaning.

On the other hand, Julianna Pudadera’s Ang Bulawan kung Mag Inggat: Nagabulag, Makabululag reflects on the seductive brilliance of gold and its capacity to conceal as much as it reveals. Desire itself becomes a form of blindness, obscuring the histories of violence and displacement that often accompany the pursuit of wealth.

Hannah Vergara-Figueroa’s What Remains and What Is Being Protected bring the exhibition to its final reflection on landscapes transformed by extraction, asking what disappears not only from the earth but also from collective memory when land is reduced to resource.

Each work, in its own way, returns us to the same question: Who does gold belong to? The definitive answer remains beyond grasp. Instead, the exhibition assembles histories that keep the question open, renewing historical consciousness by revealing gold as a material suspended between ritual and commerce, kinship and conquest, memory and exploitation, where its meanings continue to be negotiated across historical and cultural contexts.

If pag-ayag names the act of bringing something to light, then what Sang ang Bulawan Waay na Gin-Ayag reveals is that gold is never alone. The wedding band returns to us transformed by the histories the exhibition has brought into view, bearing the social life and cultural biography it has accumulated through time. In doing so, the exhibition leaves the work of pag-ayag to us, inviting us to keep sifting through the layers of the past as we reconsider what gold, and the land from which it is drawn, are truly worth.

Sources and Further Reading:

Appadurai, Arjun. The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972.

Buenavista, Kristine. Sang ang Bulawan Waay na Gin-ayag. Exhibition essay for Kikik Kollektive, Art for Everyone. SM City Iloilo, 2026.

Garibay, Emmanuel. Art History as the Evolution of the Sacred. Quezon City: Artletics, Inc. and National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2025.

The Kahimyang Project. “Candido Iban: The Pearl Diver Who Financed a Revolution, Born October 3, 1863.” https://kahimyang.com/articles/3295/candido-iban-the-pearl-diver-who-financed-a-revolution.

National Museum of the Philippines. “Oton Gold Death Mask Gallery.” https://www.nationalmuseum.gov.ph/exhibitions/nm-western-visayas-regional-museum/oton-gold-death-mask-gallery/.

Ong, Ted Aldwin. “Golden Island: Pan de Azucar.” Forum-Dimensions, official student publication of West Visayas State University, 2001.

Ong, Ted Aldwin. “Gold in the Backyard.” Onward, official publication of the Concerned Citizens of the Community, Iloilo, March 2003.

Ong, Ted Aldwin. “Mining Debt and Environmental Disaster.” SunStar Iloilo, June 14, 2004.