Navigating Fear and Flourish in Uncertain Times: Sustainability, Creative Expression, and Connections Ateneo Institute of Sustainability’s National Arts Month Celebration

Navigating Fear and Flourish in Uncertain Times: Sustainability, Creative Expression, and Connections

Ateneo Institute of Sustainability’s National Arts Month Celebration
 

This National Arts Month, we’re celebrating the transformative power of the arts in addressing the most pressing ecological issues. As the sustainability hub on campus, the Ateneo Institute of Sustainability (AIS) recognizes the critical, bifocal role of the arts in addressing ecological issues. On the one hand, the arts allow people to channel, process, and express a wide range of emotions, such as worry, grief, helplessness, and even hope, towards the urgent environmental issues society faces today. On the other hand, the arts also offer a space for people to reflect and celebrate the beauty and wonder of nature.

The National Arts Month is an annual celebration of the transformative power of the arts in our communities and of the creative prowess of artists nationwide. For the upcoming celebration, we hope to allow members of the Ateneo community to engage their feelings towards the urgent issues we face, but also towards their own personal relationships with nature. The event also aims to connect with the community on another level, reinforcing the reality that sustainability and the conversations surrounding this are not limited to scientific data and research.

This celebration consists of a month-long art submission collection period for a digital exhibit of all submitted works, and a culminating activity at the end of the month where physical works will be displayed in Colayco Pavilion, an Art for Urban Ecological Literacy Workshop by KaLIKHAsaan (2 March 2026, 3:00PM-5:00PM), and an Open Mic Event (3 March 2026, 3:00PM-5:00PM). 

🖌️CREATIVE EXPRESSIONS ON SUSTAINABILITY: ART SUBMISSIONS
Submit your works of art that respond to and/or express your reflections about society’s most pressing ecological issues for a chance to be featured in our online exhibit this February.

    📃 View the prompts and guidelines in tinyurl.com/AIS2026ArtGuidelines    
    🔗 Submit your entries at: go.ateneo.edu/AIS2026ArtSubmission

🌸KALIKHASAAN WORKSHOP
Join the workshop entitled "KaLIKHAsaan: Art and Creative Writing for Urban Ecological Literacy” by the Project Kalikhasaan team of the Sandbox Residency Program.

    📅 2 March 2026
    ⏰ 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM
    📌 Colayco Pavilion
    🔗 Register at: go.ateneo.edu/AIS2026ArtWorkshop

🎙️CULMINATING OPEN MIC EVENT
Express yourself through music, dance, or poetry, and perform your heart out for the planet and the people in our culminating open mic event.

    📅 3 March 2026
    ⏰ 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM
    📌 Colayco Pavilion
    🔗 Signup for a slot at: go.ateneo.edu/AIS2026OpenMicSignup 
 

Navigating Fear and Flourish in Uncertain Times:
Sustainability, Creative Expression, and Connections

The Digital Exhibit

Week 1 Submissions

Waves of Injustice: The Unseen Sacrifices of Our Fisherfolk

By Rlance Chua, Higher Education Teacher

With each paddle and each stroke, fisherfolk from UGMMARIZ, Calahan, Cardona, Rizal navigate their second home within the waters of Laguna de Bay. UGMMARIZ is a long-term Service Learning partner of OSCI.

We'll Be Fine

By Mys (@mys_iiry), Undergraduate Student

This piece was particularly inspired by a song entitled “Earth”, written by sternlight. The artwork was created to emulate the themes of companionship, hope and support expressed through the song’s use of metaphors in the form of caring for the planet. The artwork is currently used as the cover art of the song which is the QR code to the song is embedded.

Week 2 Submissions

Feel the Tears of Our Mother

by JL Algo, Alumni

It is common among many Filipinos to look into ecological disasters as divine acts. Nature is seen through their eyes as a deity that inflicts its wrath upon being scorned by the corrupt acts of humanity. Yet more often than not, there is another lens with which to look at our reality. When it comes to the recent flood control scandals that have dominated national headlines, the irony is not lost; it took flooding, a phenomenon that can submerge and trap communities, to expose the truth that can set an entire nation free from a toxic, normalized state. With this context, this literary work paints the extreme flooding and its aftermath as nature's response that is multidimensional - a poetic act of mercy as much as wrath, one of healing as much as destruction. 

Endangered Species

by JL Algo, Alumni

The life of environmental advocacy is regarded as a noble undertaking, which requires to genuinely listen to the cries of the earth and the poor. Yet it is also dangerous, a reality that has been confronting environmental defenders in the Philippines for decades. This literary work looks into how environmental defenders perceive these threats to their lives, reminiscent of the situation faced by one of the more popular specific subjects under environmental advocacy: endangered species. 

Week 3 Submissions

Earth

by sternlight, Undergraduate Student

A song addressing a close friend and their connection to the singer, comparing them to the planet we live in. Can also be a metaphor for wanting to take care of the Earth, personifying it.

Oh Deer

By Lucia L. Montinola, Undergraduate Student

Painted on February 2, 2020, 'Oh Deer' conveys the fear of our irreversible impact on the Earth and humanity's tendency to turn a blind eye to environmental degradation. The deer, representing how nature suffers as a consequence of human problems, looks the viewer in the eye, as if to ask "why".

These Hands that Hold the Rain

By Adineco I. Suriaga, Graduate Student

The eroded and open hands that dripping against the dark speaks the life of a person living in labor and love for the earth. They do not catch the rain but instead they receive it as a blessing, a promise and gift of renewal. These hands are mapped with the dirt of a lifetime that lies the story of the water. These also define the weathered hands the holds the harvest tale, the planting, the waiting, the trusting of what the sky will bring. Water, the earth’s most essential and most sacred offering, flows though fingers that have known both drought and abundance. Embracing the hope in adversity to be resilient in suffering, these hands give us the moment of reminding ourselves that the earth does not abandon those who tend to protect it, and for that reason even in our most vulnerable time we are relying to the important of water to our lives. 

Returning What We Take

By Mys (@mys_iiry), Undergraduate Student

The lone ghost wanders into the forest hoping to find a place to rest. A forest beams with life, and that’s what this ghost wants to remember as they pass on. We merely return what we take from this world after all. And we’ve received plenty enough to give.

Rot

By Lianying (@_pickledcoffee_), Undergraduate Student

The heady stench of dead flowers, the stifling sense of rot; this piece represents the fear of decay.

To Be

By Lianying (@_pickledcoffee_), Undergraduate Student

An introspection regarding nature and its cycle- as one where inspiration fares forth from the gaze of the artist and shapes the self. 

Between the Rubbish

By Shunn Dhaniel G. Legaspi, 1 AB Political Science

Who suffers if you kill the environment? It is the poor. — Gina Lopez

In Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’, he warns us that the Earth is our common home. But, is this really the case here in the Philippines?

NO—our home is flooding, burning, and choking, while the powerful steal, bribe, and destroy. Youth like me pick colors from the landfill, breathe smoke from burning garbage, watch rise fields vanish under environmental degradation in exchange for profit.

Thus, the personal is, and will always be, political and environmental.

We must demand a systemic change and a justice that is not only social, but also ecological and inclusive. Demand a solution that hears the cry of the poor. 

sanctuary

By Danielle S. Baldono, 3 BS Physics

I took a picture of a blue bird I saw behind pipac and it looks like it was taken in a forest but its really just behind pipac.