Serving as the repository of Cordillera’s tangible and intangible heritage, University of the Philippines-Baguio (UPB) recently opened   Museo Kordilyera at an impressive three-level concrete-and-glass structure on campus.

Museo Kordilyera (MK) is the first university museum in that part of the country that features not only the various ethnolinguistic groups in Cordillera and their material culture but also the scientific researches of its faculty, said museum director and UPB professor Analyn Salvador-Amores.

Amores said the architecture of the museum followed the sloping contour of the campus and they had to dig underground so the structure would fit well with the environment.

On the opening program, UPB chancellor Raymundo Rovillos said the museum, first conceptualized in the 1980s, was a tangible expression of the university’s role as a custodian of the collective memory and identity of the Cordillerans and the people of Northern Luzon.

Rovillos said MK served as a platform for dialogue between communities through various activities such as exhibits and symposiums.

The museum, a modern structure of concrete, glass, metal and wood, has a permanent collection of ethnographic materials from the Cordillera, temporary exhibition spaces, visitors’ room for orientation purposes, audio-visual room, visible storage, a shop and café.

Opening with the museum were three inaugural exhibits: “Batók (Tattoos): Body as Archive,” by Amores; “Jules de Raedt: Life Works, Lived Worlds,” by Victoria Lourdes C. Diaz; and “The Indigenous, In Flux: Reconfiguring the Ethnographic Photograph,” by Roland Rabang and Delfin Tolentino Jr.—CONTRIBUTED