ISLAND WEATHER

Philippine Participation to the 58th Venice Biennale 2019

Tessa Maria Guazon, curator

Islands are at the core of this exhibition project as it crafts and proposes new imaginaries of place-histories.

Islands connote origins and leave-takings. Islands are simultaneously finite and endless because bound by land and open to sea.  They intimate grounding yet their very nature is movement: the shifting of earth, the crawl of clouds, the crash of waves, the very weather itself.

Islands are malleable and allow ‘grand designs’.These designs shape the investigations the exhibition will take, as it lays out a trail marked by imposing and beguiling structures and forms. Image, sound and movement will be explored in a site-specific and site responsive installation project, an immersive environment to simulate a voyage – an island hop. The trail will consist of tableaus – expansive sceneries that combine history, fantasy and myth; signposts to our histories, an archipelago strung along a fraught past and uncertain future, burdened by the legacies of colonial history and the weight of protracted modernity.

Island Weather also references a vernacular quip for the fleeting nature of power. It deepens artist Mark Justiniani’s investigation of vision and its role in the construction of truth. It is aimed at deepening our conversations on ways of seeing and means of perception, the nature of space and  the constructs of time. In a piece where stillness and movement are combined and contrasted, where journeys are simulated, the history of a nation is refracted to conjure an image of radical hope.

The journey the art project will take will be on islands drifting on bodies of water – in a manner similar to the way art buoys the spirit, its capacity to keep us afloat. Imagination’s terrain cannot be fully charted as do the edges and limits of the human will.

Art after all, remains the last frontier of an agency rooted in imagination and mobilised through hope.