→ 2024—2025
“Soil-beings (Lamánlupa) honors soil as the central element of architectural understanding,” the NCCA says it “invites the public to sense soil not merely as a component of construction but as a kin and life force integral to existence.”
Philippine Pavilion 2025
Venice, IT
→ 2024—2025
Philippine Pavilion 2025
Venice, IT
Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA)
Office of Senator Loren Legarda
Cur. Renan Laru-an
Art. Christian Tenefrancia Illi
→ 2024—2025
Philippine Pavilion 2025
Venice, IT
The Terrarium does not present soil as an inert backdrop to human life but as a dynamic force, a space of motion and interaction, absorbing and releasing histories, ecologies, and affects.
Soil is never still. It shifts, breathes, erodes, replenishes, and transforms. What appears as solid ground beneath our feet is a vortex—an endless spiral of movement, decay, and renewal.
The installation places nearly a 1000 soil tiles—collected across three workshop sites in the Philippines—its formal language may seem informed by extractivist logics—gridded tiles, compartments, volumes—but inside, the soil moves with its own logic.
It breathes. It leaks. It decays. It absorbs the microclimates generated by the overhead weathering system. It absorbs us, too—our footsteps, our gazes, our presence.
The work stages what we might call a slow refusal: a material turning away from commodification. Even as we try to frame it—architecturally, scientifically, socio-economically—soil continues to elude us. It transforms. It seeps out of the categories we build for it. This is not a monument. It’s a living organism.
→ 2024—2025
Philippine Pavilion 2025
Venice, IT
→ 2024—2025
Philippine Pavilion 2025
Venice, IT
→ 2024—2025
Philippine Pavilion 2025
Venice, IT
Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA)
Office of Senator Loren Legarda
Cur. Renan Laru-an
Art. Christian Tenefrancia Illi
→ 2024—2025
Philippine Pavilion 2025
Venice, IT
Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA)
Office of Senator Loren Legarda
Cur. Renan Laru-an
Art. Christian Tenefrancia Illi
→ 2022
TINIKLING.EXE / TERROR or ¾
A machine stutters. Metal arms snap together, gnashing like mechanical jaws. Bamboo poles collide, a violent clap echoing through the space. The rhythm is both erratic and relentless—too forceful to be graceful, too (un)precise to be human/machine.
The installation resurrects the choreography of Tinikling, a folk dance that is at once a celebration and a reenactment of colonial punishment. In the Spanish-occupied Philippines, those who failed to meet their labor quotas were forced between bamboo poles that clapped against their ankles—an improvised device of discipline, later transformed into ritual. The dance is an algorithm of survival: a body forced to adapt to rhythms not of its own making, leaping between violent constraints, improvising within the logic of colonial rule.
Barcelona, ES
Here, the human dancer is absent. Instead, robotic limbs—scavenged from the wreckages of the extractive automobile industry—inherit the task of mechanical violence. The bamboo, once a tool of both punishment and play, now performs autonomously, detached from its historical operators. The machine does not dance. It does not remember. It only executes.
But somewhere between execution and repetition, a question arises; who or what is the subject of this performance? The colonial apparatus has long automated itself—economic policies, surveillance technologies, global labor flows—each iteration more abstracted than the last. The tinikling bird, evading its captors, has become data. The foot hovers over the pedal. A decision lingers. In the gaps between movement and machinery, between history and code, resistance is rewritten.