The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

71 Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan In flight Husband-and-wife team Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan live their art. They use everyday domestic objects to make art works which are powerful metaphors for contemporary experience and identity formation. Highlighting the fluidity of these personal and communal identities, and caught between destinations — never fully arriving but always in flux 1 — their works explore ideas of consumerism, home and dislocation. Making associations between individuals and communities, the Aquilizans create a framework for the exchange of ideas, creating new relationships and dialogues, and fostering new understandings. The Aquilizans participated in APT3 (1999) with Project be-longing #2 1999, a work exploring ideas of kinship and the place of memory in evoking the sense of lives and experiences shared. The installation comprised household items and mementos from members of Brisbane’s Filipino community. In inviting the Aquilizans to exhibit in APT6, after ten years, with In-flight (Project: Another Country) 2009, we have an opportunity to see how their work and lives have progressed. In Project be-longing #2 , the ‘community’ was based on a group organised around a shared heritage, living in a particular location. The title acknowledges the creative potential of difference in people, groups, contexts and places. It also undermines geography as a perimeter for communities, which are globally dispersed. As demonstrated by this work, and their work for APT6, collaboration is central to the Aquilizans’ practice: working both in and outside the studio, with individuals and amongst communities, they foster the exchange of ideas, new relationships and dialogues. The Aquilizans migrated to Australia from the Philippines in 2006, and now share in the experience of global diaspora with their children. Their current work continues to engage social and educational elements, while it also unearths what artists do, by making art and its processes visible. Engaging hands, minds and relationships, In-flight (Project: Another Country) comprises hand-sized and handcrafted aeroplanes, assembled en masse from donated recycled materials. The gallery space becomes activated by people adding to a large pile of aeroplanes, from which a suspended spiral of planes takes flight toward the Gibson entrance of the Queensland Art Gallery. To construct this work, individuals fashion their own unique aeroplanes using discarded and personal objects: the intricacy of their construction and the prodigious variety of material used is impressive. The rudimentary cruciform of the aeroplane is suggestive of Catholicism, the prevalent religion in the artists’ homeland, and the cross is a point of intersection encouraging interaction. It too invokes the points of the compass and the four corners of the earth — associations reinforcing the artists’ interest in global diversity and interaction. An earlier installation, Project be-longing: Presences and absences (Erasure and remembrance) 1998, shown at the 6th Havana Biennial, revealed the beginning of the Aquilizans’ interest in ideas of collaboration and exchange. Here, the artists organised a collection of some 10 000 used toothbrushes from a town in the Philippines, getting to know the inhabitants through the process. Even such mundane objects reflect their owner, who, if wealthy enough, could discard them before they became worn. Collated as an enormous mass, however, they lose their specificity; as Alfredo Aquilizan comments, in mixing the toothbrushes together the work ‘becomes a metaphor for obscured identity’. 2 A more recent work, Address 2007–08, 3 reconfigures personal objects in cardboard balikbayan boxes, used by many Philippine migrants to transport their belongings. A Tagalog word, balikbayan literally means to take back to the nation or country. The Aquilizans used these boxes as moulds to ‘cast’ blocks of their own possessions, which were transported from the Philippines, becoming the foundation for a future projection of their home in Australia. Here, the home is no longer a stable site, but a patchwork of desires and impermanent arrangements; home is a place where the continuing story of a family’s life is constantly being lived. 4 Building on these earlier works, In-flight (Project: Another Country) expands on connections generated through the construction process. The recycled materials used to construct the aeroplanes for In-flight have been gathered and assembled through a series of workshops involving both children and adults in Brisbane. The plane shape becomes the embodiment of people drawn together via a common purpose and place, and their suspended formation is evocative of a wheeling flock of birds gathering and breaking up into bigger and smaller groups on a migratory flight. As if preparing for a journey, this installation promises a new understanding of home, identity and belonging. Michael Hawker Endnotes 1 Flaudette Datuin, ‘Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan: Home, family, journey’, The Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999, p.120. 2 Gina Fairley, ‘Project. Memory. Migration’, Eyeline , no.62, summer 2006–07, p.46. 3 Address 2007–08 was exhibited in the Art Gallery of South Australia in the ‘Handle with Care’ exhibition, and was installed at the Central Promontory for the Singapore Biennale in 2008. 4 Claire Doherty, Claustrophobia [exhibition catalogue], Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1998, p.12.