‍Peregrine Dislocations

Ambling into Another Country is taking a trip into familiar, yet alien territory. The only ambient sounds within the gallery are cacophonies of native roosters crowing, their robust and raw cries resonating through an electronic speaker across the room. The terrain is a labyrinth of bollards, those ubiquitous metal and concrete posts strewn across Manila’s urban jungles, walled in on both ends by two vivid paintings of tropical / rural vistas. Warnings, penned in both street graffiti and in plain white, greet travellers who dare navigate this landscape of contradictions: Dislocal. No country for natives.

In Another Country, artist-couple Alfredo Juan Aquilizan and Maria Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan take on the politics between distance and dislocation, collaboration and appropriation. Birthed out of their peregrine practice as Filipino migrant artists, this long-term project reflects how the Aquilizans interrogate and engage questions of contemporary Philippine art production even as their very own centers of practice shift across boundaries, countries, communities, collaborators, and viewing publics.

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Destination: Neither Here nor There

Shuttling back and forth between Manila and Brisbane for the past years, the Aquilizans acknowledge an unintended ambivalence towards the two countries they now call home. Turned migrants to Australia, a country of opportunity, and visitors to the Philippines, the land of their birth, the couple views the experience of living in each place through the doble vista lens of belonging and distance: considered as not entirely local, yet never entirely being the other, never being the temporary, unidimensional tourist or chance explorer. The heart will always know home, but what if the journey has changed the locus of where home used to be?

Clearly, the Aquilizans’ extensive experiences with diaspora have put them in a position where the usual constructed divides between global / local, foreign / home are not as clean or clear as they are projected to be. As an exhibition, Another Country is nuanced in the sense that it pursues several layers of collaboration to draw out the discussions of otherness, displacement, and distancing.

This particular show fuses three different components, all of which thread back to the critical act of collecting / acquiring the other and displaying objects in an entirely different social context: “Take-Place,” an installation of found bollards through ‘social networking’ strategies; “Vying for Dawn Airspace,” the pre-recorded soundscape of Philippine roosters by an Australian artist; and the “Mabini Project,” involving the appropriation and re-presentation of works by landscape and still life artist Antonio Calma within the context of a regional collaborative art initiative.

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Take Place: An Exercise in Negotiation

The idea of displacing boundaries and transporting territories is explored in the exhibition’s central installation: the bollards project. As functional and symbolic markers of territoriality, exclusivity, and consequently, power, these bollards—sometimes stamped with their own D-I-Y authorial markings as fashioned here in the Philippine streets—make for precise conceptual targets.

The Aquilizans’ collaborative projects usually emphasize the process of collection, privileging the narratives and energy behind the intentional accumulation of objects. For this show, the couple solicited ‘acquired’ bollards through the social networking site Facebook (which interestingly, ranks Filipinos as its fifth largest demographic worldwide, with around 19 million users). The gallery eventually was filled with bollards from ‘friends’ who responded to this call for collaboration with substantial hauls from various parts of the metropolis.

As a public art project, the bollards may very well be silent witnesses to the literal and symbolic heists and hijacking of boundaries incurred in the journey away from the streets and into the gallery space. The two artists have observed, in retrospect, how the strategies that people employed to pursue these elaborate operations reflected the various aspects of art production—from conceptual and logistical planning, mobilization of resources, and determination to push through with the plan and deliver the goods to the gallery, for instance.

Perhaps, the real risk and vitality of the project lies more in its unseen, unarticulated aspects and the narratives behind the covert collection of almost half a hundred bollards by unnamed collaborators. The maze of these phallic objects morphs into tangible proof of a collective undertaking and a question begging to breach the divide: what is private, and what is public, territory?

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Vying for Dawn Airspace: Transporting Otherness

In addition to the bollards, pursuing the idea of dislocation and displacement involved the construction of not only visual but also auditory states of dissonance.

Filling the gallery’s aural space was a soundscape prepared by the Aquilizans’ colleague, Brisbane-based cross-disciplinary artist Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands of Glamour. For this piece, fusing ecology and technology, Dabrowski captured a field recording of a rhythm familiar to rural Filipinos but arguably unusual to most foreign visitors to the country: ambient sounds from a fighting cock farm in Boracay Island, filled with around 60 roosters, at the crack of dawn.

Digitized, transported, and replayed within a vastly different context—this time, within a middle-class commercial complex in metropolitan Manila little seen by the displaced rural peasantry and within the confines of an art space usually left in stark silence—the recordings of raucous cock cries created an unusual, jolting experience for both gallery viewers and passersby. Combined, the bollards and soundscape stressed the contrast of the urban-rural divides and the fine line between the virtual and the natural in our everyday encounters.

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The Mabini Project: Constructing Privilege

The Aquilizans’ final peg on the idea of dislocation for this show involves their ongoing collaboration with Pampanga-based Antonio Calma of the ‘Mabini Art’ scene in Ermita, Manila.

The Mabini artists were among the last bastions of the 1950s conservative school of art before it was historically superseded by the modernist camp. Today, they continue to sell their works along the downtown street alongside the tourist trade in other goods, the dangers of lowbrow labeling by the art establishment and a dying industry notwithstanding.

In an attempt to critically question the idea of ‘Mabini Art’ and the problematic issue of validation vis-à-vis critical reception and market value, the Aquilizans’ previous collaborations with Calma have involved interventions, such as stacking up the latter’s works, pillar-like and by the bulk, or displayed as part of a repeated series in various exhibition contexts.

Dubbing this partnership as the Mabini Project, the Aquilizans’ attempts at self-reflexivity and critique seems to be two-pronged: the first, on the question of who validates and who buys such works? Mabini art’s (lack of) validation is, in many ways, socially-constructed; the Aquilizans attempt to reflect back on how sturdy or brittle the foundations of such a structure are. The second, implicit critique here involves a reflection into commodified constructions of country and identity: an imagined and idyllic rural nation popularized by National Artist Fernando Amorsolo’s luminous countryside scapes which have formed an integral motif among Mabini artists and spawned inquiries into the politics of such representations in Philippine art.

Within the four corners of the gallery space, the three components of Another Country seamlessly weave through a wide range of narratives involving displacements and dislocations—whether historical, physical, or contextual.

As this is an ongoing project, it is with anticipation that one can look forward to the Aquilizans’ scrutiny and nuanced engagement with other conceptual and socio-economic states of displacement within the Philippine and global contexts in the coming months.

This Manila show furthermore affirms that the strength of the Aquilizans’ collective projects lies in its spirit of collaboration. Despite (or because of) such a constant state of transit, the two have entered into simultaneous partnerships with Dabrowski, Calma, and dozens of other collaborators within and across borders that will hopefully continue to resonate with their unfolding Asia-Pacific sojourn.