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

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.

“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 and identity, deeply rooted in the country’s relationship to water and the archipelago. Yet, as Gladstone notes, in the broader cultural imaginary, the Filipino sailor has always been a side character—whether in Moby-Dick or Starship Troopers—despite being a silent force in colonization, global trade and economic systems for centuries. “They are still fueling global economies today. I think one out of every three, or one out of every four, seafarers are Filipino, which means that almost every artwork in the Venice Biennale has likely been handled by a Filipino at some point,” she says.

In the context of the Biennale’s theme of “Minor Keys,” it’s a minor story that is, in fact, structurally major. According to Gladstone, the project does not aim to speak for seafarers from a political standpoint, but rather to humanize them as individuals shaped by love, sacrifice and migration—experiences that resonate widely across Filipino and global diasporas. “This is not a social justice project—we’re not pretending to speak for sailors. What we want to do is take this cultural imaginary of the Filipino sailor and infuse it with a kind of identity we can connect to, as people—people who love, who work hard, who sacrifice. Almost every Filipino has a family member who has migrated and been away for long periods of time. It’s a universal story.”

While the title evokes romantic love, which is represented here in part, the sea is not necessarily romantic for Filipino seafarers, as it both separates and connects at the same time. “That’s the challenge: how do you maintain relationships, how do you sustain longing and desire across distance?” Gladstone points out. “This is where kinship becomes complex.”

Equally complex is the installation itself—a multidimensional choreography with four films playing simultaneously on different screens in a nod to the shifting perspectives one might take aboard a ship sailing toward an infinite horizon. One of the few national pavilions to operate this way, its structure resists singular meaning in favor of accumulation and relation. Rather than constructing a singular narrative, evocative, fragmented elements derive meaning only from their relationships to one another. Cuyson wanted to operate around the notion of frequency. “When you enter the space, there is no singular narrative. Instead, you encounter fragmented narratives, structures, reflections and openings,” he explains. “It takes time to arrive at a concept or idea behind the work. That’s where the minor register comes in—paying attention to low-frequency ideas beneath the major narrative.”

That narrative unfolds through four interconnected perspectives—the sailor, his mother (a shaman), his trans lover and the ocean itself as a sentient presence—in a queer love story that expands beyond conventional representation. “There’s no competing narrative. The four films—the sailor, his lover, his mother and the sea of echoes—run together, in sequence but also simultaneously, so you experience different perspectives at once,” Gladstone says, noting how meaning develops through accumulation and relation in this non-hierarchical structure, with recurring themes of love, longing, sacrifice and the search for home circulating across the installation’s different elements.

“The work asks something of the viewer. You need to sit with it, pay attention, look at the gaps, the silent frequencies. Meaning emerges slowly. That, to me, is the minor,” Cuyson observes, adding that this is a pavilion that requires time to be experienced.

The first three films were made during the pandemic, out of isolation, longing and sadness. Loosely inspired by Jean Genet’s Querelle—a book and a figure of particular significance for Cuyson—the work reimagines its source to challenge Eurocentric narratives and foreground underrepresented identities. Karel, the Filipino seafarer, also becomes a proxy for the artist’s own experience of living abroad.

That this is a queer love story is particularly resonant, given that the Philippines remains a deeply conservative country where traditional Catholicism is still strong. “There are very few representations of a queer Filipino sailor. Why can’t he be gay? Why can’t he have a trans lover? Why can’t he have a shamanic mother?” Cuyson considers, confirming that this was a symbolic and critical choice to bring these minor histories into the spotlight.

Cuyson has been researching Filipino maritime history, including early Filipino communities in the U.S. He found that Filipino sailors who jumped ship formed communities in Louisiana in the 17th Century, during the galleon era. “Later, their descendants developed shrimp-drying practices that became part of American cuisine. These histories are real, but I’m not a historian. I use them to build a narrative.”

The figure of the mother, meanwhile, connects to precolonial animistic spirituality later erased by Spanish colonization. Through her, Cuyson gestures toward the role of Indigenous communities in making early global exchange possible on both sides of the Pacific, not only through their labor but through their knowledge of materials, navigation and ancestral technologies rooted in an epistemology of interconnectedness with nature.

In the film, the mother fears for her son’s safety at sea, with imagery drawn in part from real footage of piracy that Cuyson incorporated. “My films are docu-experimental—I borrow from real footage, including material from seafarers themselves,” he explains. Historical research and documentation blend fluidly with contemporary seafarer content found online and on social media.

YouTube in particular has become a popular platform among seafarers, offering the opportunity to create a kind of living archive of their experiences. “Seafarers upload videos to stay connected with their families. They dance, they document their lives. It’s a way of showing care, of showing they are still alive. That became part of the research and the narrative,” Cuyson explains.

Cuyson’s practice operates through memorial and imaginative fragments, gathering and combining symbolic and evocative segments into new dialectical sequences of meaning and myth-making. “In editing, I gather fragments and arrive at the final composition,” he explains, noting that painting works the same way for him—a memory of a surface or a material embedded into the work. “The connection between painting and moving image is not direct, but there are clues… They are individual, but related.”

Silver mussels are scattered across the ground. The notion of “mussel thinking” is the key conceptual framework through which Cuyson approaches the mythopoiesis that informs the entire pavilion. Mussel behavior becomes both metaphor and method, in which filtering, clustering and sedimentation become ways of understanding memory, history and relationality across time. “Mussels physically create new life through their byssal threads, filtering the ocean—taking in both good and bad—and through that process, they generate new life. They sediment, forming deposits of memory and history, and they cluster together. So this becomes both a conceptual and a physical metaphor for how the story unfolds,” Gladstone explains, noting how this mirrors the Filipino seafarer or overseas worker who must stay resilient amid adversity—maintaining relationships with mother, lover and country.

Through this distinctly Filipino “archipelagic thinking,” the pavilion reimagines the ocean not as distance or danger but as a lived space that connects communities and sustains forms of belonging. Bringing to Venice a powerful narrative of the Philippines as an archipelago shaped by geographic realities, migration and labor, it foregrounds the human stories that move through—and in many ways shape—international shipping routes, and the world’s most economically essential yet culturally invisible workforce, long overlooked in global history. That this exercise feels urgent now is inseparable from today’s geopolitical and economic dynamics, as shifting powers and alliances continue to redefine the global landscape.

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