SEAT project and Southern Philippine scholars presented a collaborative paper on reclaiming Muslim Mindanao heritage from Spain
On 20 September 2025, the SEAT project members Ariel Lopez, Eleonora Poggio and Birgit Tremml-Werner joined Southern Philippine scholars Ayshia Kunting and Tirmizy Abdullah in presenting a paper at the Annual Conference for Philippine Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, “Repatriating Philippine Heritage”. The conference explored the return and recontextualization of Philippine material heritage housed in European institutions.
The title of our prerecorded presentation was “Repatriating Muslim Mindanao/Bangsamoro Heritage from Spain: A Collaborative Research Initiative.” Focusing on nineteenth-century objects, our paper addressed the condition of emptiness in the Philippine South––both in terms of the physical absence of cultural artifacts in local institutions and emerging museums and the lack of access to knowledge about this heritage among Muslim communities.
We emphasized the rightful need for these communities to engage with their own past. Using the framework of two-sided emptiness––the material emptiness of museums and heritage spaces in the region and epistemic emptiness derived from the disconnection between communities and their histories––we advocated for a more inclusive and reciprocal dialogue between overseas institutions and local communities. While recently founded museums in the Philippine South struggle to present tangible cultural heritage, many of the historical objects and photographs of their past remain in storage in European institutions, commonly not even on public display, while often poorly, erroneously, or insufficiently identified. Our presentation underscored the need to reconnect these objects with their communities of origin as a prerequisite for cultural recovery and historically accurate contextualization.
Written by Birgit Tremml-Werner and Eleonora Poggio.
