Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan artist-in-residency

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan Solo Exhibition

Sense of Place: Project Another Country

Exhibition

We collaborated with NPO organization One-Forty, and more than a dozen of art-related background students in this project.

One-Forty has paid attention to the issue of migrant workers in Taiwan for a long time. In this project, they invited 20 workers form Indonesia to the gallery and encouraged them to interact with the Aquilizans. They used cardboard, daily objects with regional and cultural symbols to create small paper boats (note1) that symbolize the memories from the past, the feeling of the present moment, and the future in their imagination. At the same time, these migrant workers' stories also became the fountains of the artists’ creativity. Countless social context and emotional links between Southeast Asia and Taiwan transformed into several one-and-only installation works in Taipei.

The latter one is an extension of social education. Students and the artists interacted with each others closely and exchanged their thoughts on the immigration issues within Taiwan, the Philippines and Australia.

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Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan work together as a couple, parents and artists. Though they pursue individual creative vocations, their collaborations dwell on their everyday life within a family of five children. The duty of raising them and the intimacy of ensuring their well-being have come to inflect their work with collective habits, or habits of collection - and also of belonging. In the Philippine setting, where filial ties are extensive, the Aquilizan brood cannot be solitary; it is but part of a community of kin that weaves in and out of the household. Through the years, the home as an abode gathers testimonies of passage: of clothes and toys outgrown, furniture stacked in storage, and other possessions strewn along paths.

The practice of Alfredo Juan/Isabel Aquilizan indexes the habit of keeping and investing things with sentiment. It is a disposition shaped by varying desires: as a matter of necessity for a family of five children and as a matter of contingency for artists seeking the intimate contexts of a collective, whether kin or nation, the mass or the global. It is further deepened by their experience as Filipino migrants in Australia and their commissions of installations across the world.

The Aquilizans negotiate identity vis-à-vis tracing points of mobilities. Always considerate of the heterogeneous nature of spaces—a virtue they termed as collaborative—they establish kinship not with place nor people but with the exodus itself. This is the bond that contextualizes their past, present and future projects, irregardless of the constant restructuring of the methods and modes of representation of their artworks—identifying with departures as a poignant tribute to all, like themselves, who have managed to make homes out of strange lands, keeping memories of the passage as the foundation of new dwellings.

Note1: These boats were displayed in One-Forty’s annul exhibition in 2017.