What does it mean to constantly be in transit? Between one place, space, language – one way of being – and another?

Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan have built their lives and art by being on the move, between the Philippines, Australia, and in myriad places where they make work – Spain, Japan, Singapore, the UK, New Zealand, and many more. It’s a moot point whether they follow the work, an experience they share with millions of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), or work converges with their trajectories. This is why one series of works is titled Project Another Country (2008–ongoing). More than most artists, even in what the 2021 Australian Census tells us is the world’s first migrant-majority country, the Aquilizans are artistic nomads.

It’s November 2022, and Alfredo and Isabel are completing work for Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter (2022–23), at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, for opening celebrations for the new building there. After that, the Aquilizans move on to their project for The National 4. They are already planning, consulting the family. Then they will find materials, ideas, processes. Crucially, they will work with Campbelltown’s histories and communities, and with Campbelltown Arts Centre’s spaces.

If the form of the new work is yet unknown, the forces driving it are clear. This is a time of change for Alfredo and Isabel, a pivot between three Covid years spent far from their five children, in the Philippines. This was the only period in four decades when the family was separated. But being in the Philippines during the pandemic prompted the question: What was home, really, for them? Isabel says she loved being ‘at home,’ (1) but was longing for her children. Now the Aquilizan family is back together in Australia. How to reconnect, after that painful time, with children who are now adults, ranging in age from 36-year-old Miguel, a veteran of the international art circuit, through Diego, Amihan, and Leon to the youngest, Aniway, now 23 and just finished art history studies in Brisbane. All have individual practices and day jobs; since the family has been based in Brisbane from 2006, all have worked at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

With the Campbelltown project, the Aquilizan family will reunite to work together. This is not just a milestone: it’s a mystery to be explored. They will work carefully, with love and respect – and tentatively at times, since family interactions come packed with complex baggage, and that freight has changed greatly over three years. As always, family is a work in progress. But if the family community is a notional studio, where and what is their ‘dream home’? Remarkably, it might be a cardboard box, or what Filipinos call the ‘balikbayan box,’ a ‘return home’ box. Brown cardboard is so ordinary as to be abject, yet its emotional and political significance for Filipinos is extraordinary, given its centrality to the national experience of migration and return. For decades, the Aquilizans have used cardboard for collaborative projects where the familiar material – cheap, flexible, manipulable – makes it congenial, approachable. They work with volunteers to cut and shape cardboard into little homes, ‘dream homes,’ that are models but also amulets, charms for the future that signal multiple possible spaces of belonging.

Will cardboard be used at Campbelltown? Who can say? In any case, Alfredo Aquilizan points out that ‘the invisibles’ are the real project, rather than materials or objects; Isabel Aquilizan says that relationships forged while working are perhaps the most important part of their practice. (2) The community, the family, is made through the work. And that lies – again, as always – ahead.

(1) Interview between the artists and author, 2 November 2022, and subsequent emails.
(2) ibid.