At the August 9–11 Astro Arts Festival in Vancouver, B.C., Filipino-Canadian artist Mara Cortez painted a mural to honour community members who died when a motorist drove into a crowd following this year’s Lapu-Lapu Day Festival in April.

Cortez created Pagalala at Pagasa (Remembrance and Hope) at the Astro Arts Club, 165 West 4th Avenue.

“As the only Filipino muralist participating in this year’s Astro Arts Festival, I’m incredibly grateful to Filipino BC for sponsoring this work and helping ensure our stories are visible in public space,” Cortez said. “Representation in art is not just symbolic—it is necessary. It tells us we belong, we are seen, and we are remembered.”

The mural was based on Filipino traditions and incorporated precolonial funerary practices. According to Cortez, the work symbolized a spiritual journey across water and a passage between mourning and memory, loss and hope. “This wall was not just a painting,” Cortez said. “It was a site of remembrance, reclamation, and resistance. It was also a love letter to the strength of our community—and to the generations before and after us who continue to fight for joy, justice, and healing.”

Filipino BC executive director Kristina Corpin-Moser said the organization wanted to provide a space for grieving and collective healing. “Supporting Mara in bringing this vision to life was our way of saying: we will not forget,” Corpin-Moser said. “Through this mural, we held space for sorrow—but also for strength, for unity, and for the hope that rises when we come together.”