An image from head designer Stanley Ruiz’s concept for the Philippines’ guest of honor pavilion for the 2025 Frankfurter Buchmesse. Image: FBM, PhlGoH Pavilion
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
See also:
Frankfurt’s Guest of Honor Handover: Italy to the Philippines
Frankfurt’s 2025 Guest of Honor: The ‘Landscape’ of the Philippines’ Literature
‘Draw that Roadmap to the World’: The Philippines’ Karina Bolasco
Publishing in the Philippines: Video Interview With Karina Bolasco
Frankfurt 2025 Guest of Honor Philippines Offers Translation Grants
The Philippines at Frankfurt: 70 Authors and Publishers
A Look at Crime and Mystery in the Philippine Market
‘A Nation That Reads Itself Into Being’
At an international press briefing in Frankfurt today (June 26), a new stage was reached in the Guest of Honor Philippines programming for Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 15 to 19).
Speakers at the news conference included Juergen Boos, Frankfurt’s president and CEO; Ines Bachor, Frankfurt’s public relations manager; Karina Bolasco, head of the literary program and curator of books in Manila; Authors Blaise Campo Gacoscos and Candy Gourley; author-translator Annette Hug; and, by video, Philippine senator Loren Legarda, “principal advocate” for the effort. (Our interview with Sen. Legarda is here.)
The Philippine guest of honor project announced that it has organized more than 77 literary events for its program, with at least 100 authors and other creative players, as well as some 50 artists “across exhibitions, performances, and films.”
Called “PhlGoH” by many of the team working on this year-long evocation of Philippine literature, the program has as its center the slogan The Imagination Peoples the Air, as a reference to what is described as the archipelago nation’s “crosscurrents and interplay between people, places, and processes.”
That line is inspired by Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, and Legarda has a particularly apt phrase for this, saying, “We are a nation that reads itself into being, a people who have written our way through disasters, colonialism, dictatorship, and diaspora, and emerged louder, more insistent, more human.
Sen. Loren Legarda
“What we bring to Frankfurt is a gathering of voices that defies singular narratives, each telling a part of the whole, offering a portrait of humanity in its most intricate and truthful form.
“For ours is not an imagination that escapes. It is awake. It questions, it dreams, and it dares—a way of seeing with eyes wide open to the world as it is, and to what our world could yet become.”
Boos, in his remarks to members of the news media during the press conference, said, “This year’s guest of honor presentation is opening a gateway to the rich cultural variety of the Philippines—a country unknown to many in Europe.
Juergen Boos
“I’m very excited that the stories from 7,641 islands with more than 100 different languages are coming to Frankfurt to show us the lively, vibrant and contradictory history of our guest country.
“We’ll experience Philippine literature live through numerous events, from readings, discussions, and talks to fliptop rap performances that tell of everyday life and new beginnings, of political upheavals, inner struggles, and self-empowerment.
“Through Philippine literature we’ll get insights into colonialism and societal changes and learn more about climate fiction. Under the motto “The Imagination Peoples the Air,” a program is being created that builds relationships: between continents and generations; between colonial heritage, climate change, and visions of the future.”
Karina Bolasco
Bolasco, speaking as the lead on the literary elements of the program, said, “As we occupy centerstage at the global literary marketplace, in this time when the world is malignantly divided, our spaces—the guest of honor pavilion; the Asia Stage, and our National Stand—are for dialogue, for listening and reflection with clarity of purpose and respect for one another.
“These are forums to engage in ideas, guided by memory, and driven by resistance to any injustice, emerging or entrenched.” (Our interviews with Karina Bolasco are here and here.)
‘An Unnerving but Hopefully Irrepressible World’
Image: FBM, PhlGoH Pavilion
The annual late-spring / early-summer guest of honor press conference at Frankfurt is frequently a place and time for some focus on the coming pavilion. Traditionally, its conceptual framework and guest of honor book market at Frankfurt is represented by an original suite of points that become metaphors for the program overall.
Patrick Flores
Certainly, the visual impact of the images provided by the program and by Frankfurter Buchmesse for the news conference appear to be likely among the most challenging in recent years of such guest-of-honor designs.
Patrick Flores, the curator of the guest of honor pavilion, and Stanley Ruiz, the pavilion’s head designer, told the news conference that the pavilion’s components are “configured like islands,” and this is why in some images you seem to see “structures dispersed and yet [with] pathways into each other [that are] fluid, meandering like routes of water or trails of the hills.
“The skins of the structures,” Flores’ commentary tells us, “are translucent membranes that recall the quality of kites or lamps, both referencing anecdotes around Jose Rizal. Those surfaces are also screens for the moving-image project of Gary-Ross Pastrana and the drawings of David Medalla animated by Mervin Malonzo.
“The overall feeling in the pavilion is one of airiness, lightness, generosity. It is an open situation for honoring the gifts of writing and reading in an unnerving but hopefully irrepressible world, conceived by a guest who peoples the imagination.”
Stanley Ruiz
Stanley Ruiz’s design for the Philippine pavilion, as Flores puts it in a prepared article of rationale, “integrates local materials with modular architecture that is also furniture. The presence of local form speaks to age-old and contemporary creative disciplines but also to emerging innovation, bringing together distinct sensibility and the talent in deconstruction and improvised assembly, viewed as an exploration rather than a fixed and fixated final look of identity.
“The dominant materials involved in the construction include kapis (shells), bamboo, and pineapple fabric, alongside steel and fabrics.
“Central in Ruiz’s imagination are the integrity of Philippine materials and technologies as well as the intuition to repurpose and refunction. It includes elements like circular layouts suggestive of gathering and sharing across Philippine communities.”
In this overhead view, the idea of the Philippine archipelago comes into play in Stanley Ruiz’s concept for the Guest of Honor Philippines pavilion at the 2025 Frankfurter Buchmesse. Image: FBM, PhlGoH Pavilion
This article may be updated as more imagery from the news conference in Frankfurt becomes available.
More from Publishing Perspectives on Guest of Honor Philippines at Frankfurt 2025 is here, more on the Philippines market is here, more on guest of honor programs in world publishing’s book fairs and trade shows is here, and more on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here.
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