Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan : Home / Return 2019

"Habitation : Project Another Country" 2015 / Installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo / photo: KIOKU Keizo


Home/Return 2019
Aniway Aquilizan (curator)

What happens when the dust never settles? What are we left with from constant movement and change? These are some questions posed by Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan in Home/Return (2019). Cardboard material taken from a site-specific ephemeral installation in the Museum of Tokyo four years ago (Whose place is this (2015), now takes form as sculptural objects and wall works. Once a dwelling created by a child or a person belonging to a community, its new form is reconfigured and removed from its original. We think of its absence in the imagined community from which it belonged.

However, present in this absence are the stories and narratives of every maker. These are collaged and constructed into the abstract assemblages now standing. Moving from Tokyo, to Taipei, through to the Fruitjuice Factory Studio in the Philippines, the material finds itself back at its place of origin. Collected vignettes of particular moments are immortalised in its form. Never fully removed from their original context and the narratives they hold, is it telling of movement that is non-linear in being and thinking?
Most importantly, the work reminds us of the “invisibles”; the connections, relations encounters made during, and inextricable to, the process of (un)making the objects

"Assemblage11" 2019

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Miguel Aquilizan : Lost and Found : Click here


Miguel Aquilizan (b. 1986. Manila, Philippines)
currently lives and works in Los Banos,
Laguna, Philippines at the Fruit Juice Factory. M Aquilizan explores aspects of society and
history through poetic narratives that are assembled, scavenged or found. Challenging
cultural memory and interrogating notions of cultural displacement and ambiguity due to
globalization, migration and colonialism.

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THE FRUIT JUICE FACTORY STUDIO
As a place where the artists nested and raised their five children, prior to their emigration to Australia from the Philippines in 2006, Los Baños holds large significance for the Aquilizans. Nestled between shorelines of Laguna de Bay in the North, and the escarpment of Mount Makiling in the South and South east, sits the fertile and abundant municipality of Los Baños. There lies the Fruit Juice Factory.
In 2012, contemporary artists Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan purchased the former nata de coco fruit-juice factory, and has since converted it into a studio. The history of the factory as being a place of production, has long connected the local community to transnational spheres. This runs on parallel lines with the process of art making within our contemporary globalised context. While interconnections of trade have always been in place, the Fruit Juice Factory studio is a place that creates sustainable connections with the local and global community through a hybrid cultural production. This synergy of the past and present foregrounds the role of art in creating a community that transcends local, national and regional borders.
The Fruit Juice Factory Studio is a space that brings people together. The space enables craftsmen, artists and artisans hailing from different cultural, socio-economic and political realities to come together through shared, but variegated experiences. The Fruit Juice Factory Studio allows for opportunities to put forward complex questions, and a fresh understanding of our lived world through the process of coming together in art. The studio sets out to create glocalised neighbourhood through cultural production, where the local community works with other artists from different parts of the Philippines and the globe. Held in this, is also the Fruit Juice Factory Studio’s focus on a sustainable practice. Unlike unconnected and fleeting artist residencies, the studio stands to maintain networks to encourage a thriving, innovative cultural practice that educates and creates change. As well as this, the studio has a focus on what the Aquilizans often state as making do, with strong concentration on upcycling.
The Fruit Juice Factory Studio responds to historical legacies as well current issues we face. It works to redress colonising and harmful practices in the art world, thus allowing the self-determination and creative autonomy of creatives. Lasting connections are bound together through experience and shared practices that is intrinsically unique in its maintenance of local identity as well as a hybrid identity. The ripples of past cultural art practice are held intricately woven to the that of the present and the future. Thus, the Fruit Juice Factory Studio comes into orbit around the role of art in cultural vitality and resistance, to connect, witness, educate.

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