Isabel Aquilizan: We met when we were kids. Alfredo grew up in a town in the far north of the Philippines, and he would spend the summer at his cousin's house in Manila, where I lived. We got together when I was in high school, and after college – I majored in communication arts and production, and Alfredo studied fine art – we got married.
Alfredo Aquilizan: We taught at the Philippine High School for the Arts, and created a multidisciplinary class that invited students to collaborate, which we called ‘multimedia explorations’. So, from early on we collaborated with each other and with others. One of the earliest works that we produced together was while I was doing my Masters in the UK. Isabel was pregnant with our third child in the Philippines, and we wrote letters every day. We created my degree show through those epistolary exchanges.
Isabel: Of course it was a challenge to balance our domestic life with our art practice. But we found a way to do that with objects we use every day, like baby sweaters, so life and art was never really separate. We have our strengths, we know where each other stands, and we support that. It’s about finding ways to connect and using materials to understand things, including situations and challenges that need to be addressed. As parents with five children, being artists was not easy but it had to work.
Alfredo: Being married with children became an extension of our studio practice. Now we have a family collective. Working with our kids, we created Fruitjuice Factori Studio for ‘The National 4: Australian Art Now’ in Sydney. The installation is made entirely from cardboard houses, and extends our project for ‘Dreamhome’, the inaugural exhibition at Sydney Modern. As the children have started their own lives, and we were separated by the pandemic, we are always finding ways to come together by creating artworks, which makes space for us to reconnect. That’s the dynamic that Isabel and I have developed through the years.
IA: Our way of working also has a lot to do with growing up in the Philippines. There are festivals and feasts we have every year when the community decorates the streets and spends time outside. But this goes beyond Christianity. It goes back to the rituals of our ancestors. In that sense, we create objects for rituals and spaces for the community. This kind of sharing is so important, and that energy is something that can be felt but not necessarily read in our work.
AA: Our MACAN exhibition does open these dimensions. Director Aaron Seeto specifically selected works that explore cultural, political, and even topographical and geographical connections between the Philippines, Indonesia, across Southeast Asia, and beyond. One early work we are showing, Presences and Absences, was created for the Havana Biennial in 1997. We collected toothbrushes from people in the Philippines and Cuba and carpeted the floor of a former bishop's house with them. The idea was to create a space to share our histories. The Philippines and Cuba were both colonized by the Spanish and shaped by global trade routes, and we connected that with the toothbrush as something personal. To get rid of your toothbrush would be like losing part of your identity, which relates to the experience of colonization.
IA: People always react differently when we ask for their toothbrushes! Some write their name on their brush, others even bring them to us in a box, most people are hesitant. These engagements are so important to our process because they are a tool to start a conversation. Wherever we go, we always try to understand what's happening around us; to immerse ourselves in places and connect with the communities we encounter with openness – to hear their stories through the objects we collect.
AA: Our interest in understanding the connection between us, being Filipino, and the rest of the world, started when we began traveling. We discover things all the time: like when we read about Cuba and learned that their national hero, José Martí, was best friends with our national hero, José Rizal. We talk about these connections through objects that can be read as universal because people anywhere can relate to them. That strategy is very conscious for us. The artwork is the documentation of all the exchanges that transpired while making it, which remain invisible but for us compose the art form itself.
IA: That’s why we felt Presences and Absences would be a good introduction to our practice in terms of how we work with materials. The installation is also site and space specific, so its form and context change wherever we install it. At MACAN, the toothbrushes will surround a ramp that leads to the rest of the show. We’ll also be showing works from the ‘Left Wing Project’, which we started in Indonesia during a residency in Yogyakarta in 2015. We were invited by curator Alia Swastika and didn’t have the obligation to produce anything, so we spent time meeting people.
AA: We met farmers whose sickles, known as arit, were passed on through generations. We learned that the tradition is dying since it’s cheaper to buy a sickle made in China. When we found out that the street sign you see in Indonesia that says, ‘Belok kiri jalan terus’ or ‘Turn left and go ahead’, was a password used during the 1960s uprising, we thought about the history of the left in Indonesia, and made our first blade wings here. We present this with the recorded sound of the hammer that blacksmiths make when crafting the arit.
IA: This is how we started the ‘Left Wing Project’, where we make wings made of blades from different countries in Southeast Asia. The sickle is so symbolic of agrarian issues across the region, including land and labor rights, so we started doing research in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Taiwan. In Taiwan, there's this factory in the Kinmen islands that makes knives from artillery shells. We have also created wings in the Philippines, using the traditional practice of pandayan blade-making.
AA: We’ve created a new wing work for the MACAN show. Somewhere, Elsewhere, Nowhere combines 92 birdcages to make the shape of an airplane wing. We’ve been reading about songbirds in Indonesia, which poachers catch and bring to the island of Java for their songs, which is very ironic in a way. While the birds create this social space for humans who keep them to compete in bird singing contests, they are kept in this little cage alone.
IA: We always look at how social spaces are created through objects, but here it’s the birds creating social spaces. That’s why we are showing the empty cages in the shape of a wing together with a sound composition of songs by these birds. We always return to the wing as a form as it goes back to ideas of flight, freedom, migration, and refuge.
Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan are represented by Yavuz Gallery (Singapore, Sydney)
Isabel and Alfredo
'Somewhere, Elsewhere, Nowhere'
Until October 8, 2023
Museum MACAN
Jakarta
Stephanie Bailey is Art Basel's Conversations Curator, Art Basel Hong Kong, as well as the Art Basel Content Advisor and Editor, Asia.
Published on June 27, 2023.
Caption for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, Here, There, and Everywhere (In-habit: Project Another Country), 2018. Installation view of 'Cosmopolis #1.5: Enlarged Intelligence,' Mao Jihong Arts Foundation in collaboration with Centre Pompidou, Chengdu, China, 2018. 2. Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, Here, There, and Everywhere (In-habit: Project Another Country), 2018. Installation view of 'Cosmopolis #1.5: Enlarged Intelligence,' Mao Jihong Arts Foundation in collaboration with Centre Pompidou, Chengdu, China, 2018. 3. Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, Wings Baanan Series – Baby Wings, 2021. Courtesy of Yavuz Gallery. © Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan.