Itinerant objects, here and elsewhere
It’s a curious composite of a word: belonging. Intermingling the ideas of “being” and “longing,” the word is an attempt to reconcile the poles of identity and desire, selfhood and yearning.
To belong is to be in a constant pursuit for a greater whole, something that might resemble a rootedness to someone—or somewhere. In the second installment of Ateneo Art Gallery’s exhibition “Project Belonging,” artist-couple Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan ponder the complex facts of belonging as overseas migrants. Its distances, departures, and displacements. Its accumulative force.
Almost two decades ago, in 2006, Isabel and Alfredo, along with their five children, left the country for Australia—a geographical and social shift that has become a resonant theme across their practice. The works showcased in “Project Belonging” tread similar territory as the artist-couple construct a terrain of dislocation and loss.
Most prominent in the show is their mixed media installation titled ‘Nothing to Declare.” As though unsettled somewhere in the middle of sea, the installation comprises personal belongings that were shipped back to the Philippines upon the couple’s return. A majority of the objects are wrapped, concealed the way goods are shipped and traded.
The objects themselves are easily identifiable: a baseball bat, lawn chair, sofa, lamp, clothes rack, helmet, suitcase, and so on. Taken altogether, they signal a decisive shift from one place to another, a homecoming that is also an inventory of a shared life.
“Foreigners: Project Another Country,” which acts as the exhibition’s starting point, situated near the entrance, brings together more of these belongings as they are crammed into an oak wardrobe closet. We find a treasure trove of media: books that include a Filipino dictionary and rebel poet Kerima Tariman’s Biyahe, albums by the likes of Steely Dan, Pavarotti and Shirley Bassey, and more. Cradled inside are also folded garments, shoes, a flashlight, and even an old iPhone box.
In crafting an exhibition that recontextualizes a mess of things—remnants of a migrant life—into what resembles a discernible structure, the Aquilizans clue us into their lived experiences, a life specific to their social and economic standing as exhibiting (and successful) artists in Australia. These works, by the same token, also suggest a concealment of those specificities: in keeping the majority of the objects wrapped up, the couple asserts that they have nothing indeed to declare, that life goes hurtling forward even after displacement and homecoming.
Outside the works of the Aquilizans, “Project Belonging” features the work of another artist, the Spanish painter Enrique Marty whose art was the prominent focus of the first installment at Ateneo Gallery. Here, his pieces are relegated, albeit unevenly, as foils to the Aquilizans’ installation. An ominous series of paintings from 1997, titled “Vergüeza (Shame),” comprises his contribution.
Where the Aquilizans’ maximalist pieces tend to sprawl outward, Marty seems more invested in the psychological world of the uncanny, depicting a bedroom like a horror movie scene or an outline of a person like a crime scene. Details here function less as emblems of an identity, as in the Aquilizans’ case, but are suggestive in the way a dream sequence would unfold, full of incantatory details like blood or objects astray.
Curated by Spain-based Filipino curator Kristine Guzmán, the second part of “Project Belonging” is burdened by the same issues faced by its first iteration: the unevenness of representation. I wonder how much more resonant and fleshed-out the show’s ideas of belonging, migration, and displacement would be if all pieces were shown in the gallery instead of a piecemeal offering for each part. Then again, perhaps the exhibition’s incompleteness is the point: that the process of belonging is a ceaseless and restless search for something that has been lost, momentarily or forever.
