Viva Excon Art Fair 2025: Voices Carried by Sea and Wind
“Listen to the voices carried by sea and wind,” writes Les Amacio, inviting audiences to gather “fragments of history, memory, and imagination shaped by an archipelagic life.”
This reflection sets the tone for VIVA ExCon Art Fair 2025, to be held from November 21 to 23, 2025, at the Marzon Convention Center in Kalibo, Aklan. The event, part of the long-running Visayas Islands Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference, brings together artists, curators, and cultural workers to celebrate the vibrancy and depth of Visayan art.
At the heart of Amacio’s essay is the Visayas itself—a region he describes as both a “crossroads and anchor,” situated at the center of the Philippine archipelago where “cultures meet, trade flows, and traditions endure.” For him, art from the Visayas emerges not in isolation, but “in dialogue with movement: tides of migration, waves of influence, the shifting light of landscapes that surround it.”
Each artwork, Amacio observes, “carries the imprint of place.” The coastal horizon, the rhythm of festivals, and the resilience of island communities shaped by both “abundance and adversity” are threads woven into each piece. Bringing these works together, he explains, is “to create a living archive of island sensibilities”—works that testify to “daily rituals, spiritual practices, colonial legacies, and contemporary reinventions.”
Curating Visayan art, he emphasizes, means grounding it in its geography. “The Visayas is not only a site on the map but a cultural center,” Amacio writes, “where artists negotiate belonging, memory, and transformation.” The artists’ creations, he adds, register how identity is shaped by the islands’ position—“central yet peripheral, rooted yet outward-looking.”
Ultimately, Amacio invites viewers and fairgoers alike to see Visayan art as both local and expansive: “deeply tied to its shores, yet resonant beyond them.” For him, to curate from the islands is “to trace how art becomes an extension of geography itself—fluid, porous, resilient, and ever-changing, like the seas that bind the Visayas together.”
VIVA ExCon Art Fair 2025 stands as a testament to this vision—where the voices carried by sea and wind converge once more, echoing across the islands and into the wider world.
