Confluence

The Philippine Pavilion at the 16th Venice Biennale is a meeting of two major forces shaping our built environment today

Following the call for examining an idea of “Freespace” (“Pookginhawa” in the Philippine context) by the Biennale curators, the Philippine Pavilion underscores the strategies by which Filipinos use the built environment as modes of resistance and appropriation to an ever-changing world.

The City Who Had Two Navels, curated by Edson Cabalfin, is a critical response to National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin’s important literary work The Woman Who Had Two Navels and a celebration of his birth centennial. The pavilion highlights two “navels” that are in constant dialogue: first, how colonialism impacts the formation of the built environment; and second, how the process of neoliberalization alters the urban landscape.