Despite abaniko (fans) installed in the jeep for sweating passengers, it is a hot and humid afternoon ride to Ibaan, a mid-sized town in Batangas in the Philippines. I am on my way to If Trees Could Talk, an international art biennale presented by nonprofit organisation The Center for Art, New Ventures and Sustainable Development (CANVAS) and housed in an old mango orchard.
Ibaan’s landscapes are vast agronomical horizons of family orchards, sugarcane, grain fields, and pastures for raising livestock. The place used to have plenty of iba (Phyllantus acidus), a deciduous tree with sour fruits believed to have given the town its name. Yet today iba trees are rarely observed in town.
With its young population and proximity to major cities via expressways, the town is slowly moving towards an agro-industrial economy — making it an appropriate setting for works that explore conflicted ecological relationships and forgotten connections to nature.
Yup, there’s a biennale sa bukid (in a rural community).
A walk through the trees
From the farm gate, a giant sea turtle in a grassy field welcomes the visitor. This is Laurence Vallières’ Nanay Pawikan, a sculpture of a native turtle made from plastic sheets. Radiating a spirit of play, the giant yellow sculpture recycles plastic waste that endangers marine life.
Another piece that uses unique materials to make its point is Geraldine Javier’s Air, Water, Earth, Fire, Void. This odd yet cheerful installation resembles a huge wind chime made from metal scraps covered in discarded fabrics, with metal cans reused as planters, all hanging from the branches of a mango tree.
As the plants grow, the work suggests that nature ultimately reclaims the materials extracted by the industries. The piece was made through a workshop with the children and women in the community neighbouring the biennale.
Sitting between trees is Lilim by Don Bryan Bunag, a dome made of black guryon (kites). Kite flying is no longer a common form of play in the digital era. Hailing from Bulacan where an “aerotropolis” is being built, the artist draws our attention to how rapid city-making changes the experience of childhood and how once ubiquitous practices fade into the realm of nostalgia. The blackness of the dome evokes mourning, but the cozy structure still invites the kids (in us) to come in and play.
Visitors will enjoy cute encounters with puppets installed on a tree, from a workshop conducted by Matthias Garff and Veronica Garcia. From the first glance, it is evident that the puppets are a product of play and imagination, just as art should be. During the workshop, children pondered what species might live around a mango tree and crafted puppets from pre-collected garbage. They also created a mini-film starring their tin-canister hornbill birds, plastic-bottle geckoes and butterflies, and spiders with coconut-husk bodies, bottle-cap heads, and plastic-strap limbs. Swinging under the mango tree, the puppets recreate the joy of childhood encounters with nature, as a tree canopy served as a daycare for most of us living in the bukid.
Up on a small hill stand the Tree Huggers, a collaborative work by painter Elmer Borlongan and sculptor Lito Mondejar. The large-scale installation references a historical protest by the Bishnoi sect of India, many of whom sacrificed their lives to protect their sacred Khejri trees from the army of the Maharaja of Jodhpur. Tree Huggers talks about biodiversity and tree conservation, but the incident that inspired it also suggests that bad governance, throughout history, is a threat to both nature and culture. Using tree-hugging as feel-good imagery for social media means little if our governance does not have genuine participation mechanisms for environmental activists and indigenous communities to protect our lands from exploitation.
The visitor might be forgiven for asking if the huge clump of cloth sacks with bamboo framing was part of the biennale. What I encounter is the post-Typhoon Aghon form of Mycelium Clouds by Leeroy New. The humongous piece has become a spider-like alien nest of inorganic webbings collapsed on the wet ground. It is almost like the typhoon saying, “No one’s allowed to have other-worldly imaginings in a climate crisis.” This “uninstallation” could be said to represent the struggle between our ability to reimagine a better — but distant — future and the immediate urgency of rebuilding in a climate crisis.
The walk through the trees may end by reaching Not A Mirage, a mirror-clad wishing well by Jose Santos III and Pam Yan-Santos. Here, the youth can write down their wishes for the environment and throw them into the well, while seeing themselves in relation to nature through the fragmented reflections.
Missed opportunities
But as I walked through the exhibition, there was just this feeling of hinayang, loosely translated as a feeling of regret about a missed opportunity — specifically, the opportunity to engage more with local ecological sentiments.
Nanay Pawikan, for instance, cited a piece of biogeographical trivia — the presence of five out of seven pawikan (turtle) species in the Philippines — that can be easily found even in such unlikely places as a seafront developer marketing site. But the lecture that accompanied the piece could have dived deeper into issues such as the ownership of coastal lands and its implications for pawikan conservation, or why waste is hard to manage in poor coastal areas.
The Air, Water, Earth, Fire, Void installation design did not really allow the plants to thrive on it. In fact, most of the plants had died, as the design is not practical for gardening. As a community worker myself, I wondered what the mothers made responsible for maintaining the plants thought about it. Perhaps the piece could have been better tailored to the community’s needs or even produced harvestable plants. As it is, it put forth ecological musings, but failed to integrate them with daily domestic concerns.
Overall, the biennale shied away from calling for systemic change integrating governance, conservation, and social justice, instead leaning on individualistic means of reconnecting with nature. Nevertheless, staging a biennale sa bukid, where the very word “biennale” might be heard by many for the first time, still suggests a forward-thinking spirit in imagining ways to coexist with nature and navigate the current ecological crisis.
Protecting play
But what the biennale does successfully convey is the importance of play — not only through its immersive art installations, but also through its associated workshops and conversations encouraging imagination and individual thought. Play is an undervalued right for children, while their right to safe and healthy environments is often overlooked in community architecture (see the daycares and schools that resemble concrete boxes more than welcoming spaces for children to play, learn, and dream).
If Trees Could Talk thus serves as a seed to turn an old mango orchard into the forthcoming Tumba-Tumba Children’s Museum of Philippine Art — an institution which will hopefully narrow the gap between art and social action, acting as a “third place” to give children enjoyable learning experiences and foster healthy community relationships. Play, after all, is a right that must be protected as much as the sacred trees.
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The If Trees Could Talk International Art Biennale runs till 28 July 2024 at the Tumba-Tumba Children’s Museum of Philippine Art. Find out more at iftreescouldtalk.art.
Header image: Laurence Vallières, Nanay Pawikan, plastic sheets. Image courtesy of CANVAS.
