Ferdinand Carlos Sanchez, who goes by the nom de art Bong ti Baguio, created a unique Christmas tree for the tourist town of Sagada.
He and his men installed last week the Christmas tree at the side of the basketball ground on the way to the church at Calvary Hill.
It is an upside down tree made of 300 unused face masks. He decided to call it Face-X-Mask Tree.
Bong ti Baguio said that his inspiration for the shape is the bukatot, an indigenous fish trap.
He also saw it as a symbolic acupuncture.
“The initial idea was acupuncturing the earth to allow life forces to flow freely,” he said.
“This includes cleansing, capturing all the dark forces like the virus, all the pains and fears into the ‘bukatot’ or ‘ube’ (fish trap) and releasing it deep into the earth, to undergo transformation. It is also like sowing seeds of hope in the midst of darkness,” Sanchez said.
Commissioned by Boy Yunchengco and Tom Killip, Sanchez and his co-artists assembled the huge tree in secret without getting permission from the local government and then installed it one night.
“We also set up a light from the inside,” he said.
“The people thought it was like a mushroom that just emerged there,” he added.
Too bad that Sagada still restricts the entry of tourists. It would have been a treat to come from Christmas Mass and see the FACE-x-Mask before sunrise.
– Rappler.com
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