Zofia Agama

Batch 2021, our journey began in OrSem 2017, Likha, where we were entrusted with the goal of, not only envisioning, but creating a future within and beyond the four walls of Ateneo. Three years into our journey, in our last year, we were met with the tumultuous advent of the pandemic where we bore witness to how nothing, yet everything, has changed; in Dolomite beaches, in unwarranted mañanitas, in bigger national debts, in aggravated police brutality, and brazen killings

Inscapes, as a narrative art form, tells the artist’s stories of love and loss, of motherhood and midlife crisis. In this study, I explored how Inscapes comprehensively plots Arellano’s life at different junctures in time as represented and actualized in the feminine and the divine, the erotic and the macabre, and the psychological and the mythological.

Through Arellano’s feminist herstorical perspective, I argued that Inscapes achieves great feats in recovering the matriarchal roles in religion and mythology, in delineating the place of both sexes in history, and in evaluating the capitalist-patriarchal postcolony—a milieu that she has lived through, and we continue to live in, today.

Where there is reciprocity between crisis and creation, there must also be a continuity in breaking the boundaries between them through action.

Mo Yan’s “Frog” as a half-imagined narrative of an obstetrician-turned-abortion doctor is a story that is paradigmatic of how far people will go to demonstrate their dedication to the Communist Party and is a critical glimpse into the ills and inhumanity of the Chinese Communist State. In “Frogs,” these issues are explored through the predicament of Aunt Gugu and the one-child policy’s doubly taxing ramifications on women.

In Romero’s quote, I see both the faith position and Sartre’s philosophy working hand-in-hand as we are called to participate in the good of all humanity. Across all generations, we come to know that this good endures only by the work of those who chose to sow the seeds that we reap today in blood, sweat, tears, and fervor for a cause. Romero’s words then ring true: we may never see what lies beyond our efforts today, but in our work--in our participation in the Master Builder’s vision to bring His kingdom on earth--there is a present that holds future promise.

While the protagonist Rama, in the Ramayana is revered as a paragon of princely virtue, his character also emulates stark undertones of the patriarchy exemplified in the over idealization and valorization of a patrifocal rule, in the treatment of women as peripheral, auxiliary, and burdensome characters in the story, and in the exclusively gendered dharmic responsibilities that hamper the opportunity for women to transcend their roles.

The 68th year of Heights opened with confusion and chaos as the fated headline on the novel coronavirus brought the world to an unprecedented halt. In a blink of an eye, the Ateneo's doors, once packed with bustle and ambition, fell silent and weary, as news of the virus deprived the world of any hope or vision of a future.

“There are things I now keep in mind in my writing that I didn’t before, both craftwise and from a reader perspective. The workshop helped me carve out a clearer voice and make my personal project work better.”

Danie Cabahug is this year’s non-fiction fellow. In her years of writing, from fictional worldbuilding to journalism, she grew inclined to write non-fiction as a means of understanding an encultured world through one’s personal experience of it.

What turns moments into milestones? For Agnes Arellano, her journey through womanhood and motherhood shines brightest in hindsight. Located at the Ignacio B. Gimenez Amphitheater of Ateneo de Manila University’s Areté, the sculpture installation Inscapes: A Retrospective unpacks her personal history and celebrates 36 years of artistry.

What defines a feeling of terror as uncanny? Freud would argue in his essay on “The Uncanny” that the uncanny or unheimlich does not stray too far away from the core feeling ascribed in heimlich, a term associated with words such as homely and comfort (917). There is a deemed familiarity assimilated in unheimlich, and this is precisely what makes it horror-inducing; the estrangement of an object that was once recognized in the mind as homely, comforting, and familiar.