Regional institutions in the arts pursue three indispensable mandates: research, instruction in arts, and community service through the arts. In order to concretize these mandates, local institutions must strengthen its material infrastructure. Art studios and laboratories, theatre and lecture halls, art spaces or galleries, libraries and publications, these are just some of the facilities that they muster to support a growing community of artists, scholars, film makers, and designers. These material infrastructures, however, is only secondary to a more important component of the institution: its human or intellectual infrastructure. This part of the institution is comprised of cultural workers and personnel who embody the knowledge and competencies that animate the institution. The cultural workers comprise the intellectual infrastructure of the institution. Their knowledge and competencies serve as mechanisms that make hearts and minds of cultural workers work to fulfill mandates and goals. In other words, their knowledge and competencies are the contents that make any cultural program responsive to the demands of institutional mandates and social realities. Without a timely and relevant content, any art or cultural program will surely fail to address the needs of immediate and adjacent communities. With timely and relevant content, any cultural program will help surmount problems that confront its constituents and immediate communities.

Timely and relevant content then is crucial for the institution to function effectively. The lack of art reception at the local level discourages our prized artists from practicing in their home provinces. It also furthers the relegation of regional art to the peripheries. As if local art exhibits and art practices do not count as events worthy of scholarly or critical attention, region-based artists are often left to fend for themselves without institutional support. This problem is reflective of the weakness of regional institutions in promoting the cultural and intellectual dimension of the arts—a weakness animated by the outmoded paradigm that many local institutions espouse. This regrettable realization poses a challenge to local artists and cultural organizations to step up and function not only in the department of art production but in the department of research, publication, and community service as well.

Recognizing that the task falls within the realm of art pedagogy, and that the promotion of art discourse is in fact inviolable to the mission of cultural workers in the periphery, select practicing artists in Cebu set to task the formation of Regional Art Forum. This forum, needless to say, seeks to promote discourse on local or regional art by facilitating dialogue between writers or scholars and practicing contemporary artists.

The ends of this initiative are: firstly, to encourage discourse, scholarship, and publication on regional art and; secondly, to further encourage the practice of contemporary art in the provinces. With these goals in mind, the forum gathers the community of artists and writers in the regions for a sustained effort to address the backlog in regional art reception. We hope that the formation of this forum performs the task of updating and archiving relevant content which will make us more responsive to the demands of institutional mandates and, by extension, the artistic and intellectual needs of local communities