“I once stood on a beach at Real in Quezon province, watching a man build a house. There was a structure and he was slowly sifting through a pile of wood, finding bits that he could add to the house that he was building,” Australian artist Tony Twigg shares. “My pictures are made in the same way. They are an accommodation of the ideal within the possible, which I think is essentially Filipino.”
You spend a good number of minutes watching a video documentary on a large flat LCD screen showing workers chiseling pieces of marble with electric powered tools. You are seated on a long wooden bench—there are two of them, more like rectangular boxes— facing the two LCD screens positioned side by side. Behind the monitors, you can see some greenery in the pocket garden outside the floor to ceiling glass windows of the gallery in that part of the UP Vargas Museum where Maria Taniguchi’s works are on exhibit.
No, she doesn't just simply choose the artworks and hang them on the wall. This we learned from Hala Jaber, an art consultant commissioned by Kingdom Holding Investment, a company owned by Saudi prince Alwaleed Bin Talal. They brought her to Manila to work on the newest luxury hotel, the Raffles Makati as well as the Raffles Residences.
“Starting in 1997, I started to document every building I physically entered,” says artist Charles LaBelle. The Dwelling Archive is an ongoing project in which he has been documenting the various buildings in places he had visited around the world.
“You are my third visitor this week. This is a Guinness Book world record for Kapangan,” chuckled Asao Shimura when I visited him at his house in Poking, Kapangan, Benguet Province. Poking is located approximately two and half hours away by jeep from Baguio City.
A group of young girls are sitting on the floor, some stretching, some putting on their toe shoes. One girl says, “Papa, just give us a step, then we’ll do it.” They call him papa as they discuss ideas on how to pose for the photo shoot. “You know, all my dancers, they call me papa,” says Russian ballet master Anatoly Panaskuyov. “It’s nice because they are my children. I love them. I love everybody. If you are working with me, if you dance with me, if you come for my training… For me, everybody is important.”
