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The Philippines Pavilion Turns the Country’s Maritime History into an Archive of Universal Longing

Artist Jon Cuyson’s deeply considered narrative unfolds through four interconnected perspectives—the sailor, the mother (a shaman), the trans lover and the ocean itself—in a queer love story that expands beyond conventional representation.

Few are familiar with the Philippines’ central role in enabling the first truly global maritime trade, with galleons sailing regularly between Manila and Acapulco to forge a transoceanic link between East Asia and the Americas as early as the 16th Century. Fewer still recognize the extent to which Filipinos sustain global seafaring today, accounting for more than 25 percent of the world’s maritime workforce. This year, the Philippines Pavilion in Venice brings that heritage into sharper focus, approaching it not through a strictly historical lens but through a mythic and emotional framework that connects macro and micro histories, the personal and the collective, geopolitics and intimacy.

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“Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig,” curated by Mara Gladstone, presents an immersive, poetic journey by Manila-based visual artist and filmmaker Jon Cuyson, who has created a fluid multimedia orchestration of new works across 20 freestanding paintings, small sculptures, sound and moving images. Just a few rooms from the main exhibition in the Arsenale, the site represented a spatial and conceptual challenge for Cuyson—one he welcomed. The challenge extended to funding, which was addressed with characteristic Filipino resourcefulness: the large-scale three-dimensional paintings, which function structurally within the installation, were designed so that the entire exhibition fits into a single shipping container.

Gladstone describes the experience of entering the pavilion as stepping into a vessel: “You enter the pavilion and step into an abstracted horizon made up of paintings. Wherever you look, you encounter variations of the same scenario—clusters of paintings, monitors placed in different positions, where different films are screened at the same time.”

The project explores the sea as a living repository of stories of maritime labor, migration and colonization, as well as of kinship forged on the water. “It’s about thinking of the sea as a living archive for submerged histories—unseen maritime labor, migration, ecological precarity and kinship. The project tries to attend to overlooked frequencies in the world,” Cuyson tells Observer as we walk through the pavilion.

The show centers on the Filipino seafarer, an iconic figure in Philippine culture........

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