We are pleased to welcome the artists Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan to FSA’s fall residency in Charleston (September 28–November 8). Over the past twenty years, the Aquilizans have cultivated a distinctive practice building large-scale installations utilizing diverse materials, often with the collaboration of various local communities. Their collective process of art-making, as well as their aesthetics, are informed by their personal experiences as diasporic Phillippine artists. Their artworks respond to global narratives of migration, seeking to both reveal and to fulfill universal human desires for homes, families, identities, and communities of belonging. Spirituality runs quietly but powerfully through the Aquilizans’ work as they shape spaces of care, sharing, memory, reverence, and hope.

The Aquilizans orient their installations to the people, histories, and circumstances of those areas in which they find themselves working. In addition to engaging “families” of collaborators, the Aquilizans create meaning through their choice of materials. One they frequently employ is cardboard which, being widely available, is also democratic. Carboard references the Philippine balikbayan (return home/country) box by which many living overseas send goods home. As many of the Aquilizans’ installations—such as their Belonging, The House, or Project Another Country series—take the forms of boats, shelters, or imagined cities, the cardboard material invariably recalls the precarious nature of migratory existence. In other ongoing sculptural iterations, the Aquilizans have fashioned sacred objects, mementos, and even blankets, into structures that affirm the spiritual lives, personal stories, and dreams of their individual donors. In recent years they have turned their attention to various loci of Philippine craftsmanship, creating artworks from materials such as hand-forged agricultural blades or pineapple fiber. These works, which highlight the transformations of raw material into meaningful forms, offer meditations on labor, globalization, and the spiritual dimensions of craftsmanship.

The Aquilizans’ practice bridges their personal histories with broader historical narratives as well as individual stories of resilience, hope, and empowerment. Their residency in Charleston, which represents their first extended stay in the South, presents a new platform for their explorations.