We opened the exhibition, ‘Climate Change Couture: Sartorial Improvisations’ at the College of Home Economics Museum, featuring my original Climate Change Couture photographs from 2013 and highlighting the work of the clothing technology students from the ‘Masks for a Warming World’ workshop. The exhibition design was a result of collaborative proposals from interior design students.

The exhibition is very timely, opening under the shadow of a major government scandal involving the theft of billions of pesos of taxpayers’ money in flood control projects that never came to pass and was instead used to fund lavish lifestyles that include luxury cars.

Two of my favourite parts in the exhibition: 1. Each mask comes with a price tag, including the price of government corruption to these young designers’ lives and their futures.

2. Visitors can take a token representing 100 million pesos from the billions in flood control funding and allocate it to one of five issues: Education and Research, Infrastructure, Indigenous Peoples, Health Care, and Environmental Projects, allowing the members of the country’s premier state university to give their input on how the country must be governed.

Earlier in the day, thousands of students, faculty and staff united in protest in the largest walkout since the pandemic.

I was very moved by the students’ work, as they recognise what the climate crisis and bad governance cost their lives. One student survived Supertyphoon Yolanda at ten years old. I am so floored by the collaborative spirit in the uni, and grateful once again for @updoica and the CHE deans, faculty, and staff for their efforts. This huge projected was led by Jazz Reformed of the UP Office for Initiatives for Culture and the Arts. Congratulations to all!

The Scent of Memory: Olfactory Histories of UP Diliman is an exhibit that captures the sensorial experience of being and living in UP Diliman. The exhibition was curated by Lisa Ito of the College of Fine Arts. Below is her exhibition text:

“An Invitation to Breathe

Art, science, and memory merge in this olfactory installation by Catherine Sarah Young. Through a suite of ten scents, she distills intergenerational impressions of the University of the Philippines Diliman campus across its history since 1949: as a place, site, and space of meaning in and across time.

In exploring scent as a material for memory projects, Young presents both a homecoming gesture as a UPD College of Science alumnus and an inter-sensorial inquiry about the present. The works signify moments recalled from archival narratives from the university’s collective history and distilled from the environment: from spaces inhabited by various generations to the land comprising the Diliman campus in the postwar era.

In Marcel Proust’s novel, In Search of Lost Time (1927), an oft-cited passage describes affects triggered by a delicate cake and reminds us of the entangled relationship between the senses and remembering. These moments of olfaction are a way of cuing us into what was, and shape our own sense of what can be.

Offered as evocations and prompts, the works in this installation thus serve as a prelude to a smellscape of the present milieu:

Tatag. Aral. Tambay. Pahinga. Hilom.

Libot, Tipon. Lasap. Liyab. Tala.

What scents have steered our understanding of the past? What scents are now shaping a generation steeped in climate crises and global war?

Savor a moment to breathe and take in these re-collections. As fleeting presences, these are doubly precious in this time of rapid ecological and socio-economic change and unrest. The challenge asked of us: to attune oneself and ourselves, sensorially and sensitively, to shaping what lies next.”

I ran a workshop with university alumni and staff to agree on the ten scents, ranging from the environmental (petrichor!), to the intellectual (pens!), to the place-based (the university infirmary), to the gustatory (pancit canton!) and to the symbolism of the university as a place of struggle and student protest (Molotov cocktail). As an alumna of the college’s molecular biology and biotechnology program, it was fitting to host this artscience exhibition here. It was also awesome seeing my art colleagues here, as well as my former biology teacher who was one of those who taught me how to distill. The show ran until September 30th and in celebration of National Science and Technology Month.

I also ran an olfactory masterclass at the College of Fine Arts, which included a smell memory workshop, and my PhD work, the Olfactory Wheel for the Critical Zones.

This art-science collaboration with the College of Science and the College of Fine Arts was led by Vincent Juliano of the UP Office for Initiatives for Culture and the Arts.

The College of Home Economics of the University of the Philippines held a Future Feast, where students from different specialisations worked in teams to design sustainable dishes of the future with the theme, Rooted in Resilience’, centred around endemic root crops, yielding the likes of kare-kare ravioli, kamote croquette, and ube dumpling wrapper. I was honoured to be one of the judges together with OICA Director Dr. Monica Santos, and celebrity chef Claude Tayag (catch him in the series ‘I Love Filipino’ on Netflix). Students won cash prizes and we had a lot of fun.

This has been the best Future Feast since I started this in 2014, owing to the students’ efforts as well as the vision of both OICA and the College of Home Economics. I was overjoyed to hear Dean Shirley Guevarra say that she is advocating to make this an annual event. We need sustainability education and celebrations more than ever. Congratulations, dear students! We look forward to seeing these dishes in the restaurants and kitchens of the future!

‘Future Feast: Rooted in Resilience’ was part of ‘Diliman Dreams: Planetary Improvisations in a Critical Age’, my collaboration with the University of the Philippines Office for Initiatives in Culture and the Arts in September 2025.

I spent a few weeks in Manila this September to be a commissioned artist for my university in my undergraduate years, the University of the Philippines. More posts coming up, but in the meantime, how wonderful was it to re/connect with my UP / Fulbright/ Obama Leaders / Thirteen Artist Awards friends. In the troubled times we live in, I feel very lucky and relieved to have spent some of my most formative years in a university with a long tradition of student activism that taught us that standing up for something is important. Thank you, all!