Lucas Artists Fellows Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan (Brisbane, Australia) explore the connections between wellbeing, home and community with Dwellings: Project Another Country (Saratoga Hills). During artist-led workshops, the Filipino-born couple invited members of the local community, mostly middle and high school children, to build their dream home from recycled cardboard moving boxes. The artists have rearranged these handmade houses, incorporating moving pallets and packing tape, to create an installation at the Linden Grove, above the West Lawn, that resembles an improvised migrant settlement.
Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan also created Wing in Ground, an airplane wing fashioned from recycled cardboard moving boxes constructed in collaboration with two members of the South Bay community. Located in the Linden Grove, above the West Lawn, this installation features cardboard boxes transformed into domiciles and buildings and arranged to resemble the urban topography of the region. The artists eventually intend to create an entire airplane from cardboard boxes and then cast it in concrete or aluminum.
Migration, impermanence, displacement and home are themes that underpin all of Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan’s work; themes that are reflected in their use of everyday, inexpensive and ephemeral materials. With Wing in Ground and its partner piece, Dwellings: Project Another Country (Saratoga Hills), Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan responded to Silicon Valley’s transformation from an agricultural region to an urban center with one of the country’s most diverse immigrant populations. Presented together these works reflected on forced or voluntary migration as well as the importance of home and community to our sense of wellbeing. Dwellings considered Silicon Valley’s expensive housing market─one of the priciest in the US─and its residential construction boom, while Wing in Ground examined how migration often results in permanent relocation and the construction of a new community elsewhere.
This cardboard community of dwellings will be added to and reorganized over time, offering an evolving portrait of home, imagined and real.
Dwellings: Project Another Country (Saratoga Hills) and Wing in Ground are presented as part of COME HEALING, Montalvo Arts Center’s 2013 Art on the Grounds exhibition.
Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan also created Wing in Ground, an airplane wing fashioned from recycled cardboard moving boxes constructed in collaboration with two members of the South Bay community. Located in the Linden Grove, above the West Lawn, this installation features cardboard boxes transformed into domiciles and buildings and arranged to resemble the urban topography of the region. The artists eventually intend to create an entire airplane from cardboard boxes and then cast it in concrete or aluminum.
Migration, impermanence, displacement and home are themes that underpin all of Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan’s work; themes that are reflected in their use of everyday, inexpensive and ephemeral materials. With Wing in Ground and its partner piece, Dwellings: Project Another Country (Saratoga Hills), Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan responded to Silicon Valley’s transformation from an agricultural region to an urban center with one of the country’s most diverse immigrant populations. Presented together these works reflected on forced or voluntary migration as well as the importance of home and community to our sense of wellbeing. Dwellings considered Silicon Valley’s expensive housing market─one of the priciest in the US─and its residential construction boom, while Wing in Ground examined how migration often results in permanent relocation and the construction of a new community elsewhere.
This cardboard community of dwellings will be added to and reorganized over time, offering an evolving portrait of home, imagined and real.
Dwellings: Project Another Country (Saratoga Hills) and Wing in Ground are presented as part of COME HEALING, Montalvo Arts Center’s 2013 Art on the Grounds exhibition.
In most of our collaborative and community-based projects we aspire to create new relationships within the world and the foundation of these relationships is co-creation. We employ an interactive methodology, learning from each other through collaboration and creating… Migration has always been a central issue in most of our works. When we decided to leave the Philippines and migrate permanently in 2006, we became a part of that community of migrants who choose to live outside their home/land and to seek a better opportunity and chance. As we painfully integrate ourselves into what we call a rootless land or diaspora, identity is inconstant and its construction becomes a continuous process of negotiation. |
—Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan
Image Gallery
Meet the Artists
ALFREDO AND ISABEL AQUILIZAN
Website
Maria Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan and Alfredo Juan Aquilizan, a husband and wife artistic team, were born in the Philippines, in 1965 and 1962 respectively. They currently reside along with their five children and work in Brisbane, Australia.
Alfredo Aquilizan is an artist of broad sympathies. He draws, paints, sculpts, mixes media, creates assemblages, and initiates installation projects. His work heavily draws on memory of home and country. In undertaking this kind of artistic process, he collaborates with the people around him and forges connections among them. In gathering letters, domestic items, mementoes, baby sweaters, toothbrushes, blankets, and photographs of young people for identification cards, he restores the ecology of art as a system of interaction, mutual critique of differences, and the possibilities of the convergence of communities.
Isabel Aquilizan is a teacher and artist of the performing arts. She is a director and actress. Her engagement with the process of performance and its inherent collaborative possibilities led her to her collaborative partnership with her husband in installations that cross gaps between media and distances. Her role as a mother of five children enables her to intervene in recreating the art of installation as home or habitat that is sustained by housekeeping, child rearing, nurturing, and the collecting of memories. She completed her degree in Communication Arts at the Assumption in 1986 and taught at the Philippine High School for the Arts.
Website
Maria Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan and Alfredo Juan Aquilizan, a husband and wife artistic team, were born in the Philippines, in 1965 and 1962 respectively. They currently reside along with their five children and work in Brisbane, Australia.
Alfredo Aquilizan is an artist of broad sympathies. He draws, paints, sculpts, mixes media, creates assemblages, and initiates installation projects. His work heavily draws on memory of home and country. In undertaking this kind of artistic process, he collaborates with the people around him and forges connections among them. In gathering letters, domestic items, mementoes, baby sweaters, toothbrushes, blankets, and photographs of young people for identification cards, he restores the ecology of art as a system of interaction, mutual critique of differences, and the possibilities of the convergence of communities.
Isabel Aquilizan is a teacher and artist of the performing arts. She is a director and actress. Her engagement with the process of performance and its inherent collaborative possibilities led her to her collaborative partnership with her husband in installations that cross gaps between media and distances. Her role as a mother of five children enables her to intervene in recreating the art of installation as home or habitat that is sustained by housekeeping, child rearing, nurturing, and the collecting of memories. She completed her degree in Communication Arts at the Assumption in 1986 and taught at the Philippine High School for the Arts.
Partners and Sponsors
Heartfelt thanks to everyone who has helped make this work possible. Special thanks to Arts Queensland, Santa Clara County Library District, Lynn Kitajima, Art Okada, and Mary Okin.