The Urban Animal Sanctuary as Ontological Refuge: A Critical Nexus with Philippine Art, Animism, and Relational Ontology
The Urban Animal Sanctuary as Ontological Refuge: A Critical Nexus with Philippine Art, Animism, and Relational Ontology
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
August 9, 2026
The premise of a trust-funded urban animal sanctuary—conceived as a hybrid continuum of residency, hospice, memorial, and retirement for nonhuman beings, interwoven with café, workspace, training field, and modest stadium, self-sustaining through residual urban properties yet resolutely refusing husbandry, adoption spectacle, or zoological display—finds profound resonance within the philosophical and artistic matrices of the Philippines. Far from an imported Western welfare model, this proposal may be read as a contemporary reactivation of indigenous cosmologies, the relational ethics of *kapwa* and *loób*, and a lineage of Filipino artistic practices that have long negotiated the thresholds between human and more-than-human, living and ancestral, city and spirit. In the dense, extractive fabric of the Philippine metropolis, such a sanctuary emerges as an esoteric counter-site: a living *temenos* in which the city’s residual lots become grounds for interspecies hospitality, memorial inscription, and quiet co-presence.
Pre-colonial Philippine worldviews offer the deepest philosophical ground. Indigenous cosmologies across the archipelago articulated a tripartite universe—Kaitaasan (upper world), Lupa (middle world of the living), and Kailaliman (underworld)—in which animals, plants, ancestors (*anito*), and landscape spirits participated in a shared moral and ontological order. Serpents, birds, water buffalo, and other creatures frequently embodied or mediated ancestral presence; the Bakunawa of Visayan lore, for instance, linked calendar, land, and spirit world. Animism was not a primitive residue but a sophisticated multispecies ethos in which the boundaries between human and nonhuman remained porous. The dead could return as animals; nature spirits (*diwata*, *anito*) required reciprocity rather than domination. Spanish colonial Christianity layered syncretic forms over this substrate, yet the relational core persisted: the living, the dead, the deities, and the total environment formed one social and moral continuum. Contemporary scholarship on the multispecies spectrum of spiritual ethos in the pre-colonial and colonial Philippines underscores precisely this refusal of rigid human/nonhuman dualism—an ontological orientation that the urban sanctuary would materialize in architectural and programmatic form.
This indigenous relationality finds systematic articulation in Filipino virtue ethics through the concepts of *kapwa* and *loób*. *Kapwa*, often rendered as “shared self” or “together with the person,” designates an including rather than excluding self; it extends identity outward to encompass others, and, in indigenous extensions, the more-than-human world. *Loób*, better understood as relational will than as private interiority, orients ethical action toward the preservation and strengthening of relationships. Virtues such as *kagandahang-loób*, *utang-na-loób*, and *pakikiramdam* are not individualistic excellences but practices of mutual recognition and care. When these concepts are allowed their full ecological reach—as they are in indigenous knowledge systems and in certain strands of *Sikolohiyang Pilipino*—they furnish a philosophical warrant for treating aging, dying, and remembered animals as *kapwa*. The sanctuary’s hospice-memorial-retirement continuum thus becomes an urban enactment of *pakikipagkapwa* extended beyond the human: a spatial practice of shared identity that grants nonhuman finitude the dignity of prolonged presence, commemorative inscription, and non-instrumental residency.
Philippine art has repeatedly given form to these ontological and ethical intuitions. Roberto Villanueva’s environmental interventions of the late 1980s and 1990s—rooted in Cordillera animism and shamanistic approaches—sought alternative spaces outside institutional frames, performing rituals of cleansing and reciprocity with landscape and spirit. His *Ego’s Grave* and post-Pinatubo collaborations reenacted traditional rites of appeasement, treating earth, clay, and community as co-agents rather than materials. Martha Atienza’s long-term engagement with Bantayan Island and the Visayan Sea, particularly works such as *Anito* and *Our Islands*, documents the entanglement of popular religion, ancestral spirits, and ecological precarity; her practice moves beyond representation toward community empowerment, marine sanctuary-building, and the reanimation of *anito* as living force. Bree Jonson’s paintings of animals and plants critiqued the anthropocentric hierarchy that renders the nonhuman as lesser Other, seeking instead to restore a sense of interconnected wilderness. Catalina Africa’s *Spirit Ecologies* reframes nature itself as community—plant beings and elements addressed as spirits—while Isola Tong draws on indigenous craft and animal architecture to weave vessels that explore marginalized bodies, technology, and environment. Kikik Kollektive’s monumental murals, such as *Tul-an sang aton kamal-aman*, interlace Bakunawa, *babaylan*, *lunok* trees, and ancestral figures, asserting that serpent deities and *anito* remain active agents in contemporary public space. Recent institutional gestures—the Philippine Pavilion’s *Soil-beings* at Venice, which treats soil as living collaborator and architectural agent, or eco-art collectives responding to climate crisis—further demonstrate art’s capacity to reconfigure land, memory, and multispecies relation.
Within this lineage, the proposed urban sanctuary may be critically expanded as both continuation and radicalization. It refuses the zoo’s spectacular enclosure and the adoption center’s sentimental transaction, just as indigenous thought refused the reduction of animals to resource or symbol alone. Instead, it installs a continuum of care that mirrors the hospice-like accompaniment of decline, the memorial layering of presence into urban fabric, and the residency of prolonged cohabitation—practices already latent in *anito* veneration and *kapwa* ethics. The hybrid program (café, workspace, training field, stadium) is not commercial dilution but an artistic-ritual economy: modest human activity generates the labor of upkeep, archival documentation of animal biographies, facilitation of attentive encounter, and commemorative gathering. In this sense the sanctuary functions as a contemporary *temenos* or *anito* precinct within the city’s interstitial lots—spaces where the hard distinctions of public/private, living/memorial, human/nonhuman soften. Self-sustenance through trust and residual properties becomes a fiscal analogue of reciprocity: economic circulation serves ontological priority rather than the reverse.
Critically, the proposal also confronts the postcolonial and urban conditions of the Philippines. Manila’s density, the historical dispossession of indigenous land relations, and the acceleration of environmental extraction render residual lots politically charged. To claim such lots for nonhuman residency and memorial is to practice a quiet form of decolonial spatial ethics—one that echoes artistic interventions seeking alternative grounds outside the circuits of spectacle and capital. The sanctuary does not claim to redeem systemic violence; it carves a durable exception, a trust-protected field in which animals may inhabit their own time and humans may exercise a less imperial mode of *pakikipagkapwa*. Its measure of success lies not in visitor metrics or breeding statistics but in the persistence of a space where duration is valued over efficiency, co-presence over display, and the slow work of upkeep over the rhetoric of innovation.
In the final analysis, the urban animal sanctuary, when read through Philippine art and philosophy, ceases to be a philanthropic novelty and becomes an ontological and aesthetic proposition of considerable depth. It reactivates the multispecies continuum of indigenous cosmology, extends the relational will of *loób* and the shared self of *kapwa* into the more-than-human, and finds formal kinship with artistic practices that have long treated landscape, animal, and spirit as co-agents. In the restless metabolism of the contemporary Philippine city, such a sanctuary stands as deliberate anachronism and living critique: a place where the nonhuman is allowed to remain, to age, to be remembered, and, almost incidentally, to generate the human work required to keep that possibility alive. It is, in short, an urban *anito* of care—an esoteric yet rigorously grounded contribution to the ongoing Philippine negotiation of how we share space, time, and being with the others who already inhabit our world.
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™' s connection to the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) serves as a defining pillar of his professional journey, most recently celebrated through the launch of the ACC Global Alumni Network.As a 2003 Starr Foundation Grantee, Roldan participated in a transformative ten-month fellowship in the United States. This opportunity allowed him to observe contemporary art movements, engage with an international community of artists and curators, and develop a new body of work that bridges local and global perspectives.Featured Work: Bridges Beyond Borders His featured work, Bridges Beyond Borders: ACC's Global Cultural Collaboration, has been chosen as the visual identity for the newly launched ACC Global Alumni Network.Symbol of Connection: The piece represents a private collaborative space designed to unite over 6,000 ACC alumni across various disciplines and regions.Artistic Vision: The work embodies the ACC's core mission of advancing international dialogue and cultural exchange to foster a more harmonious world.Legacy of Excellence: By serving as the face of this initiative, Roldan's art highlights the enduring impact of the ACC fellowship on his career and his role in the global artistic community.Just featured at https://www.pressenza.com/2026/01/the-asian-cultural-council-global-alumni-network-amiel-gerald-a-roldan/
He is a Filipino multidisciplinary visual artist, printmaker, painter, independent curator, researcher, writer, and cultural worker whose practice spans contemporary art, curatorial work, and cultural advocacy. He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.
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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.His practice appears to represent several interconnected concerns:
Cultural work as artistic practice. Roldan has argued that the labor of curating, organizing exhibitions, teaching, documentation, and cultural administration should be understood as creative work rather than merely support work. This perspective has been reflected in his writings and exhibitions.
Social and political engagement. His artworks frequently address politics, religion, faith, denial, courage, social inequality, and the everyday experiences of Filipinos. He has stated that he draws inspiration from Filipino cultural practices while approaching painting, printmaking, and installation from a conceptual perspective.Printmaking and conceptual art. Roldan is particularly recognized for his printmaking, with works shown internationally, including exhibitions in Japan and France. His practice also encompasses painting, photography, installation, and curatorial research.International cultural exchange. A significant milestone in his career was receiving an Asian Cultural Council fellowship in 2003, which enabled him to undertake research and create work in the United States while engaging with artists and curators internationally.
More broadly, Roldan's work represents an attempt to bridge artistic production, curatorial practice, scholarship, and cultural activism . His writings often emphasize postcolonial discourse, cultural memory, and the ethics of artistic collaboration, positioning the artist not only as a maker of objects but also as a builder of cultural infrastructure.
In the Philippine contemporary art context, he can be understood as representing the figure of the artist-curator-cultural worker —someone who contributes both through making artworks and through developing exhibitions, mentoring artists, and fostering institutional and independent cultural initiatives.
Recent show at ILOMOCA
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