Pride Of Place

On the second year of its return to the Venice Art Biennale, the Philippine Pavilion moves to the main platform Arsenale, an important location to present, via the Spectre of Comparison exhibition, the complex subject of national identity

- Chit L Lijauco

With amusement, Senator Loren Legarda remembers her act of boldness at the press conference for the 2015 Venice Art Biennale, which saw the return of the Philippine participation after a long absence of 51 years. “I don’t know how I mustered the courage but I accosted Paolo [Baratta] and invited him to visit the Philippine Pavilion at the Palazzo Mora,” she says. “And with braggadocio I also declared, to the president of La Biennale di Venezia no less, that two years from now, in the next art biennale, the Philippines will be presenting in the Arsenale itself! He must have wondered who this brazen woman was!”

Apart from some national pavilions and the collateral exhibitions and events held all over this beautiful city, the main exhibitions of the Venice Biennale are in two venues: the Arsenale, the largest pre-industrial production centre of the world, a symbol of the military, economic, and political power Venice enjoyed then; and the Giardini, a French garden built when Napoleon invaded the Republic of Venice in 1797. True to her declaration (though Legarda must have harboured some doubts at the time of its utterance), the Philippine Pavilion for the 2017 Venice Art Biennale has moved from Palazzo Mora to the Arsenale, in a beautiful space called the Artiglierie.

Admittedly, Legarda says, it was not easy. It first entailed a written letter to Baratta by the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA), then a lot of communication between the Philippine Arts in Venice Biennale (PAVB)—the committee that facilitates the coordination among the government agencies involved like the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Office of Senator Loren Legarda, and the NCCA.

All the efforts were well worth it. Finally, on 16 February 2016, a letter accepting the Philippines’ request to be invited to the Arsenale was received by the NCCA.