Alfredo and isabel Aquilizan
January 2017

During the residency of Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan in early 2017,  the Cagayan Garden transforms the area underneath four original wooden houses from Cagayan province (where Alfredo was born) into a Zen-inspired garden where visitors are invited to contemplate ideas of origin and dislocation. Artists and curators in residence at Bellas Artes Projects use these houses, which were the first houses uprooted and transferred from their origin (in this case, Cagayan) to Bataan in 2000. The white, snow-like base of the project was created from marble chips that were left over when building the monumental marble church at the center of Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar. The wooden sculptural forms are found posts from other houses that were moved from their original sites to the beachfront of Bataan. As in Stefanos Tsivopoulos, Geraldine Javier, and Pawel Althamer’s works, this project creates alternative value by transforming materials previously considered worthless.