In this 2018 video from Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, artists Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan present Pillars to Posts: Project Another Country, an assemblage of stacked cardboard ‘dream homes’ created with recycled boxes, skewers, tape and glue. The community-made installation evokes themes of migration, adaptation, belonging, memory, and identity.
What does it mean to be home? To leave home? To miss home? The Aukland Art Gallery explains: “These are essential questions for Auckland and its future, given the fact that 39% of people living in the region were born overseas.” The Aquilizans’ 2006 move from the Philippines to Australia also drives the the Aquilizan’s work:
As we always say, when you leave home you don’t have any place you call home anymore, you become a foreigner and being one, we always use this as a take-off point for all our projects…
When you move, it is always a wrenching process not only on the idea that you are actually leaving home but also the process of choosing what to leave behind and what to bring along with you. What do you really need to start a new life? There is always that feeling of uncertainty, vagueness and tentativeness that diverting it to an art form, it becomes a process of healing.
Their more recent work, seen in Manila’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), echos the urban sprawl of Chengdu in China. From the South China Morning Post:
See more photos at Colossal.
Then watch more art installations, including Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room, Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 797, Patrick Dougherty’s Stickwork, and Motoi Yamamoto’s intricate, temporary salt installations.
Bonus: Caine’s Arcade.
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