Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan Sculpt Communal Dreamscapes

Whether piling used toothbrushes on the gallery floor in Presences and Absences: Project Be-longing (1999–2023) or constructing vast angel wings from discarded flip-flops in the series ‘Last Flight: Project Be-longing’ (1999–2023), Filipinos husband-and-wife artists Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan transform objects destined for obsolescence into works of art. ‘Somewhere, Elsewhere, Nowhere’, at Museum MACAN in Jakarta, surveys nearly two decades of the Australia-based duo’s practice exploring the latent psychic energy of everyday objects in space.

Recontextualized for MACAN, Dream Blanket Project: Project Be-longing (2002–23) is both architectural intervention and living archive. Hundreds of neatly folded blankets set into the wall around a central doorframe sit flush against each other. Crowdsourced by members of the museum’s community via an open call, each anonymously donated blanket is accompanied by a speaker that relays a dream recorded by its original owner. The combined effect is of a humming, polyphonic yet intimate chorus of dreamscapes rooted in the lived experience of Jakartans.

Plaster casts of the interiors of shoes, again collected from the local community, are placed on either side of a wooden walkway that leads through a central opening. Resting in pairs atop a layer of grains, they gesture toward the possible occupations of their owners: millers, farmers, labourers. One pair of adult-sized sneakers, for instance, appears well-used: falling inward, the heels evidence the repeated action of feet being hastily pushed into the shoes. In tandem, the two parts of Project Be-longing invert the private realm – dreams and inner lives – into public space, signalling not necessarily revelation but, rather, absence. I thought, for instance, of migrant labourers, who – often undocumented – often pass barely noticed within the public realm of Indonesia, wary of provoking racist or nationalistic backlash.

The invisible lives of labourers again come to the fore in the couple’s sculpture series ‘Belok Kiri Jalan Terus’ (Left Wing Project, 2017–18), in which metal sickles and chains are fashioned into wings. Though heavy by the nature of their material, the works appear weightless in the gallery, suspended from the ceiling and counterbalanced by bags of rice. Accompanying the wings is a soundtrack of workers hammering at their blades, an audible reminder of the physical labour of agriculture. In recent years, competition from the Chinese market has caused sickle-making, or arit, to become a dying craft in Indonesia. Drawing on a phrase commonly found at intersections, the series title – which roughly translates to ‘turn left and ahead’ – has another layer of meaning, since the expression was used as code between communist allies during the period of unrest, marked by anti-communist violence and political turmoil, known as the Indonesian killings in 1965–66. The sculptures, too, hold a double meaning, referencing not only the loss of intergenerational knowledge due to the impact of global commerce but also the socialist history of the hammer and sickle.

Elsewhere, Here, There, and Everywhere (In-habit: Project Another Country) (2018) perhaps best instills this sense of the dissolution between private and public life, specifically the boundary between the self and a multitudinous community. A satellite-shaped, three-dimensional map in cardboard and wood, it charts a dense, fictional city. Rather than document natural features such as mountains and waterways, it documents the sublimity suggested by the accumulation of hundreds of individual buildings varying in size and scale. At the centre of the 12-metre work is a human-sized manhole in which visitors can stand. The experience of being immersed in the map is overwhelming – not just for the intricacy of the work’s sculptural detail but for the impossibility of viewing it in its entirety. I felt the sense of being marooned somewhere, elsewhere and nowhere all at once.

Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, ‘Somewhere, Elsewhere, Nowhere’ at Museum MACAN, Jakarta, until 8 October. 

^{Main image: Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, Here, There, and Everywhere (In-habit: Project Another Country) (detail), 2018, cardboard and metal, 4 × 1.2 × 5 m. Courtesy: the artists and Museum MACAN, Jakarta}