DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 14 May 2026) — At the DAFI Artfest 2026’s Saudade, memory is preserved less in archive than in atmosphere: drifting through windows and staircases, in boats and bottles, materializing in old houses and fading light. Bodies dissolve into flora, objects attempt to hold longing, water moves, erodes, carries — breaching the boundaries between body and landscape, architecture and affect, object and organism.

Walking through the exhibit at La Herencia Davao Art & Events Pavilion along F. Torres St., one moves through fragments of longing: bodily, environmental, carried through objects, threatened by disappearance, unresolved.

Organized by the Dabawenyo Artists Federation, Inc. (DAFI), this year’s Artfest gathers 15 art groups and galleries under the theme of saudade: “a deep longing for something absent, distant, or unremembered,” as curator Dadai Joaquin explained during her curatorial speech.

Yet the exhibition resists reducing nostalgia into sentimentality. Instead, Saudade understands memory as porous and unstable — something that leaks into objects, landscapes, textures, and everyday spaces.

“What unites these seemingly disparate images,” said Joaquin, “is the idea of passage — between places, generations, memories, and states of being.”

That sense of passage emerges immediately upon entering the pavilion.

One of the exhibit’s most arresting works layer dense flora over the faint outline of a human face, almost burying the figure within roots, branches, and shadow. The face emerges from within the foliage — not fully visible, and impossible to ignore. Within Saudade, the piece feels haunted by the idea of memory as overgrowth: identities obscured through accumulation, time, and, eventually, silence. The forest does not erase the face entirely; it absorbs it. A portrait reduced to a trace, as though the self has become inseparable from the environment that remembers it.

Through the overlaying translucent textures of the leaves, faces become semi-legible, creating this sense that memory is something viewed through accumulation rather than clarity. The eyes are often closed, partially hidden, overlaid, overgrown — framing the act of looking as an incomplete act.

One wall gathers weathered houses rendered in various iterations: rooftops leaning into one another like relatives gathered after years apart, an old house submerged in shadow and rain.

As Pintal Samal’s exhibit notes read: “Every crack and stain reads like a small confession. Every window looks as if it has witnessed something it will never fully share. There is humor in that restraint … they seem mildly amused that we are the ones looking.” These lines transform architecture into a witnessing body. The house becomes a container of partial memory; but structures where traces accumulate over time.

In Aguilar’s Alaala, the house exists inside the eye; memory becomes architecture; the viewer is implicated in looking; the eye itself becomes container. And the roots beneath the house figure memory as rooted in perception.

Across the exhibit, images of bottles also recur: bottles on tables, bottles beneath flowers, bottles with fire, bottles drifting through water, bottles isolated against monochrome backgrounds. Bottles, like houses, are containers carrying fragments across time.

Elsewhere, rivers reappear across multiple works. Small boats drift through expanses of muted water; figures row toward unclear destinations. In Dimaclid’s With the Flow, two figures huddle together in a narrow canoe surrounded by dusk-colored reflections, the water almost swallowing their outlines. The image feels like memory behaving visually: faded at the edges, emotionally clear towards the center.

One striking piece transforms a lotus pod into something nearly uncanny: its clustered seed cavities almost resemble eyes staring outward against a vivid orange background. According to Castillo’s artist statement, the lotus was chosen both for its beauty and its familiarity across Asian cuisines and domestic life.

However, in the context of Saudade, the work acquires another resonance: throughout the exhibit, seeds resemble eyes, eyes house houses, flora conceal eyes, windows behave like eyes.

“Saudade” isassociative rather than rational. Random objects become emotionally charged through repetition and accumulation. A fruit is never just fruit once it appears beside a flooded blue wash, a stairwell, a door half-open, a bottle, a window frame. Objects haunting each other.

Indeed, throughout Saudade, objects repeatedly blur into emotional landscapes; bottles become containers for absence; windows become thresholds between intimacy and distance; fruits and flowers appear at once lush and transient, already on the brink of decay.

For many participating artists, these themes also required working outside their usual visual languages. Joaquin explained that artists were assigned themes through random draw lots, intentionally disrupting familiar habits and subject matter.

“Some artists have never painted flowers,” Joaquin said. “Some artists have never painted vegetables, and yet they’re given vegetables as the theme… So a chance for growth.”

That tension between comfort and experimentation gives the exhibit much of its energy. Rather than presenting a polished singular vision and sensibility, Saudade foregrounds negotiation itself: between artist and theme, familiarity and constraint, memory and reinvention.

In this light, the exhibit accidentally assembles a visual vocabulary of containment, permeability, memory, and bodily unease; a gallery of unstable containers, where doors imply inaccessible interiors, stairs suggest unfinished transition, fruit carries both ripeness and decay, and bottles imply holding while threatening leakage. The “bunot-bunot” process invokes Surrealist associations; unconscious image-making through juxtaposition.

DAFI President Lito Pepito described the Artfest as continuing despite social and economic uncertainty. “Even though we have crisis, never mind it,” he said during his welcome remarks. “Because life is here. We have to follow it.”

That tension between persistence and precarity surfaced even more directly in former DAFI VP Victor Secuya’s speech, which reflected on the economic realities artists face today — from rising material costs to the instability of galleries and art markets. Yet amid these anxieties, Secuya emphasized the importance of sustaining artistic communities and support networks.

In this sense, Saudade transforms its thematic exploration of longing into a portrait of a creative community attempting to endure together.

Near the end of her curatorial remarks, Joaquin described “saudade” as something that “lingers here, not simply as nostalgia, but as the quiet space between what an artist knows and what an artist has yet to uncover.”

Likewise, the exhibit lingers most powerfully within that space — in doorways half-opened, in rivers still in motion, in houses that continue even after memory fades.

Saudade will run until May 16. (Bea Gatmaytan / MindaNews)