→ 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.