22 Dec The Hapag Ugnayan Potlucks
Since February this year we have been building a new collaboration between farmers, activists and artists from the Philippines and the UK. The core team has been Mabi David, Jen Horn, Sally Proctor and Malaika Cunningham. We have been marching through mud, sharing meals, making katmon jelly, and having sprawling, philosophical online conversations about arts-based facilitation and research, care, grief and how we ‘spend’ time.
Through this project, we hope to continue connecting and celebrating the (often hidden) women in our food systems. And to raise awareness about the systemic and local oppressions they are facing. Through conversation, playful artistic interventions, working alongside them on their farms, and sharing meals, we’ve started to build an international network of artists, farmers and growers. In the future, we hope to work together to build a multi-sensory anthology of the women who feed us using counter-mapping, storytelling and audio capture as tools to support this.
We ran this project between the UK and Philippines remotely—although we each met with women over food and on farms in our respective localities. To ensure conceptual closeness despite physical distance, we agreed early on how we would work together, writing out some values and principles we’d like to uphold for our collaboration. We stated that we will work together in a way that also aligns with the kind of world we’d like to co-create: inclusive, just and liberated.
- Inclusivity – in that the views and visions of both parties and our communities be heard, seen, and given space to grow.
- Justice – in that the resources are divided equitably and used responsibly, in alignment with the vision set out for women farmers in this application.
- Liberation – in that both parties ultimately have autonomy and agency to choose the mode of creative expression that feels most right for themselves as a creative, and right for the communities whose liberties are also bound up with theirs.
Much of the work of this project between us over zoom has been thinking through “translations”. From English to Filipino or Filipino to English, and from cultural concepts and customs into new ways of gathering and understanding the world around us. A good example of this is the name of the project itself: The Hapag Ugnayan Potlucks.
Hapag Ugnayan is a play on Hapag-kainan, which Filipinos use to refer to a dining table (kain = eat). Ugnayan is the Filipino and Tagalog word for connection. So, taken together they mean to gather at the table. This riffs on previous work from Jen Horn, who has created a very beautiful set of cards to cultivate connection with ourselves, others and the world. A deck of 48 cards asks us questions in Filipino and in English each themed around holistic wellbeing or ‘ginhawa’. Starting with lighter questions and then inviting us to go deeper (and perhaps darker). At a meal in Sheffield with farmers and artists, we used these cards and were amazed to find ourselves immediately in intimate conversations with strangers—telling each other about sudden endings to childhood friendships, the role we play in our families and the small moments of disobedience in our daily lives.
Potlucks are known by many names: a Jacob’s Join, a fuddle, a ‘bring and share’ or a ‘pitch-in dinner’. Within this tradition, each guest brings a dish along to the communal table. If that means 3 types of pasta salads, a tray of stuffed peppers and 4 types of hummus—so be it.
There are various versions of its etymology. One is from ‘the luck of the pot’ – that we each bring something to add to a stew or shared meal and give ourselves over to chance and luck that it will become a tasty offering. The other associated term is the ‘potlatch’, which is connected to gift giving, economies of reciprocity and communal feasts originating from Indigenous peoples of Northwestern Canada and United States. From these origins, it is about sharing our wealth with our community. In her book Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer explains the concept with a story of a Western anthropologist asking how a huntsman stored his meat. He replied, ‘I store my meat in the belly of my brother’. When there is an abundance, it is shared, not stored.
Malaika grew up in Canada and potlucks were a big part of her childhood, and since 2021 she has been experimenting with potlucks as a format for food-based performance, which aims to shift power between the ‘audience’ and ‘performer’, or the ‘host’ and ‘guest’. How can we make democratic spaces with food and art? What if they were just a bit hosted by everyone? This notion was run with both in the Philippines and the UK, and through this project we really enriched the idea of a potluck. Food was certainly central, whether through the shared meals or the people who grow the food, but it was really about giving people space to show up with what they can – it was a potluck of ideas and creativity, not just of food. People show up how they can with what they have, and a genuine intention to connect and nourish one another, in the many forms that can take.
Alongside our ideas of ugnayan and potlucks, we explored other ideas – of ‘angkop’ and ‘sapat’, a sense of what is needed in the context, what is enough, and meeting that. It is a kind of satisfaction and ‘enoughness’ for when we can meet the needs of our communities. This emerged as a theme from conversations Mabi and Jen had with women at MASIPAG farmer and community leader Virginia Nazareno’s (or ‘Nay Virgie’) farm in General Nakar, Quezon, who they visited and prepared many, many suman rice cakes for the large annual Patikim festival in May 2025.
The festival is a thanksgiving for the recovery efforts after the four typhoons which hit the province in rapid succession in 2004, causing landslides in the uplands where commercial and illegal logging took place. The swollen Agos river carried giant logs and boulders full speed into the low-lying areas, destroying almost everything in its path. More than 1,500 Filipinos died in its wake. For a week afterwards, Nay Virgie could not speak. But over time, as a community, they were able to rehabilitate their farms and rebuild their communities – shifting from conventional agriculture to diversified organic farming, prioritizing endemic species, to protect their forest ecosystem. They freed themselves from the pesticide treadmill and the debt trap inherent in chemical-dependent farming. As the farmers grew in number and strength, they were able to lobby with their local government for the passing of a municipal ordinance in General Nakar, which promotes organic agriculture and supports farmers who wish to leave behind chemical agriculture and learn sustainable agroecological production methods.
The word ‘patikim’ (the namesake of the festival) means to offer a taste — the festival is a huge potluck of dishes showcasing each member-organization’s organic harvest and celebrating local diversity and abundance. But more than that, Patikim Festival is a way for them to offer a taste of what is possible through agroecology, a rights-based food production system that centers farmers, favors adaptive capacity, promotes food sovereignty, and recognizes the power and agency of producers and communities to effect just and lasting change.
Overall, our time on this project since February represents the beginning of this collaboration, which we hope to deepen and grow. Both in the Philippines and the UK, we are also looking to continue hosting more Hapag Ugnayan Potlucks and creating more tools to encourage creatives already engaged to host their own gatherings to connect more creatives with the stories of farmers too. And together, we like the idea of a co-created anthology that is experiential and not static or fixed – a living document that farmers and artists around the world could continue to build. That would expand on the idea of “the anthology as a farmers market,” where diverse ideas and products come together, and each has its own story – deepening the meaning of a potluck, through a spirit of ugnayan.
If you would be interested in getting involved with this next stage of work, please do get in touch with us at malaika@thebareproject.co.uk!
The Hapag Ugnayan Potlucks are supported by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture grant programme. This programme supports new cultural collaborations between the UK and the Asia Pacific region. This support assists artists and cultural organisations working across all art forms to create new connections and collaborative projects.
