Community pantries proliferated in the Philippines to address the corporeal hungers debilitating Filipino bodies and the Philippine body politic at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. These initiatives saw Filipinos contributing their physical labour, material resources and cultural capital to the widely celebrated cause and demonstrating expanded notions of compassion and community spirit in the face of bureaucratic mismanagement and government neglect. Many have since lauded this socio-civic phenomenon, calling it ‘a silent revolution’, ‘a ray of sunshine amidst the stories of gloom’ and an indicator of the Filipino people’s generous ‘will to give’. Examining an array of materials such as interviews, photographs, news features, video recordings and other online resources that lay bare the bodily, visual, and discursive components of these civic engagements, I show in this article how community pantries constituted a scattered and spontaneous yet coordinated network of action that mirrored the archipelagic formation of the Philippines. This ‘archipelagic effect’ involved differently stationed Filipinos who formed autonomous or interconnected collectives and engaged in improvised and shape-shifting mechanisms with the view of not only extending immediate aid to the hungry, the homeless, and the unemployed but also reworking existing socio-political structures. Such an effect also included an unprecedented convergence and circulation of goods, bodies, talents, ideas, images, creative and critical initiatives, cultural practices, and ideological commitments from across the country. I argue that this mode of doing politics, activism, and social work deviated from the ‘patronizing logics of philanthropy’, countered statist efforts of controlling the Filipino people, and accentuated a type of expressive resilience and embodied resistance that was, indeed, central to a vernacular formulation of action hunger. I conclude the article with reflections on the importance of performative solidarities – how people come together, share their resources and provide nourishment to others – in foregrounding the usefulness of the arts and other embodied acts in establishing a liveable life for precarious populations caught up in tense political climates.