Thank you, Renan! 

With the turn into a new year that demands fierce hope and tender strength of us all, we give warm thanks to Renan Laru-an for being with us in the last two years of Transition(s).

Renan joined us in 2023 with the proposal of activating Loob within and through the  SAVVY  house – Loob as both direction and reorientation. As our artistic director, he continued the task of programme development and community building, while accompanying  SAVVY  Contemporary to new destinations. In the last two years, SAVVY has hosted numerous exhibitions, sound projects, performances, readings and talks, radio contributions, residency programmes as well as a series of workshops in our new regular neighbourhood programme  WEDDING AFFAIRS . All were conceived together, reflecting Renan’s vision: „We need a faith to the fantastic – what else could be the least uncanny of sensations in today’s anxieties but to be artistic? In an ongoing crisis of reunions, when we all navigate the coasts of the can and can’t, we carry art to its socius – to the obligatory field of reaching out.“

Dear Renan, we give thanks and wish you blessings and strength for your upcoming endeavors like the curation of the Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025.

In this coming year, we – the team of  SAVVY  Contemporary with its executive co-directors, Lema Sikod and Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock – will allow ourselves (for the first time!) to slow down a bit in our programming in the first months of the year, to make space for more introspection, for listening to our own rippling and for re-attuning our antennas. We wish for all of your presence and inspiration in that process – so that our Loob can continue to conceive, create, and nourish other worlds.