Photographed by Gabriel Nivera for the May 2024 Issue of Vogue Philippines.
[Bundos Bansil Fara] is one of the three Tboli artists who were recognized as Manlilikha ng Bayan (GAMABA) or National Living Treasures in December 2023. The award is given to Filipinos whose “distinctive skills have reached such a high level of technical and artistic excellence and have been passed on to and widely practiced by the present generation.” … This is the first time a brass caster has been awarded since the GAMABA’s inception in 1992.
Brass casting is a skill learnt from one’s forebears, and Fara’s father and grandfather were all metalworkers. “I started in the process of brass casting when I was eight years old,” Fara says. Now 58, he has been working with molten materials for half a century. “My eyesight has gotten blurry.” Fortunately, he has a team of four sons working with him—one will be melting the wax, a mixture of beeswax, candle wax, and asphalt that forms a black putty; another will be tending to the blazing hot fires, fanning coals inside two holes in the ground, one for melting the metals, another for firing the clay molds.
Ginton is the Tboli god of metallurgy and the son of the supreme being Dwata. It is believed that he gifted the people with brass anklets, chain belts, rings, and swords—all of which still intricately adorn, protect, and tell the story of the Tboli today. As for the beginnings of brass, Fr. Gabriel Casal notes in his book T’Boli Art in its Socio-Cultural Context (1977), “The T’bolis give no indication of having ever possessed any knowledge of mining their own metals. These, they seem to have always obtained from old broken agong (gongs) or any of their other metal objects that break, and which they melt and re-employ for new substitutes.”
The recycling/upcycling of metals is still how Fara and other brass casters source their materials today. “We would melt down old gongs to create new items, but now there are many other things we can find at the junk shop, like padlocks, bullet shells, pipes.” The products they make are not strictly made of brass, but an alloy of brass, bronze, steel, and whatever else can be liquified in Fara’s smoldering hot pot.
(READ: Metal In The Blood: GAMABA Awardee Bundos Fara On The Craft Of Brass Casting by Audrey Carpio)
