Sites

Six years ago at MO_Space, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan spread out stolen traffic posts while playing recorded ambient sound from a fighting cock farm in Boracay. The city's provisional bollards in various wobbly, mutable renderings accompanied by the incessant crowing of vociferous rooster sin a white cube atop a furniture store provided a clever counterpoint to the pretext of order as postured by the clean and purportedly pedestrian-friendly streets of jeepney-less Bonifiacio Global City.

It is instructive to remember this previous work as the couple again inhabits the gallery with Nothing to Declare: Project Another Country. Here, a possibly more contradictory gesture is offered. Using transport pallets as material stimulus, the artists contemplate on their previous work with ethnic “Badjao” children in Davao. Brutally displaced from their homes, the children and their families have had to live in temporary settlements (i.e. “captive villages”) that are distinct amalgamations of shoreline and urban dwellings. These homes are what the Aquilizans call forms of “organic architecture,” designed because of necessity and wrought by extreme poverty, violent migrations and systemic political and social marginalization.

Like most of their work, this collaborative effort is also an exercise on – or appeal to – intuition, focusing on the visual and personal associations we establish with everyday used objects, mostly within the domestic sphere. As in the stolen bollards, it is material that simultaneously circumscribes and disengages objects with their meanings. For Nothing to Declare, the structures that facilitate transport and the flux of goods become the supports for the shelter of precarious and difficult lives. This study on a much-fetishised form of housing can be located within the long and highly valued lineage of artists who have considered the perversely picturesque barong-barong as a site/object of modernist reflection.

But there is also another clever, more bullish maneuver. Considering the aggressive machinations of gentrification that have produced High-streets, Global cities and Uptowns in Taguig, the artist's assembly of shanties in now-prime real estate (made more “vibrant” by developers through the commissioning of “public” art) turns into a sharp and discomforting gesture. The work highlights what Taguig is and was: a district that used to be home to hundreds who, like the Badjao, have been pushed off/out their homes in order to create privately owned, developed and regulated social / commercial spaces or, as in the case of the latter, convert ancestral seas to corporate fishing grounds.

Like the shopping area where it is sited, the work endeavors to provide a space or a situation where people and ideas can interact and converge. It continues the artists’ extended inquiries on dispossession, (de)construction and dislocation—the itineraries of which are similarly tied to the exhibition site's history. While the work is intensely personal, it is also able to carve out self-referential and political spaces within a tightly conceptual framework. Disruptive visual references and critical play address the site and the work's specificity. Fortunes and failures are made visible in an effort to imagine what other world(s) can be made possible and visible through brief, but concentrated, acts. In one of these worlds it is hoped that, although through harsh and circuitous paths, peoples and property are able to finally find their way home, whether home is land or sea or something else entirely.

‍