Few know the central role the Philippines played in enabling the first truly global maritime trade, with galleons regularly sailing between Manila and Acapulco to form a transoceanic link between East Asia and the Americas as early as the 16th century. Still fewer people realize how much Filipinos support global maritime today, as they represent more than 25% of the world’s maritime workforce. This year, the Philippine Pavilion in Venice highlights this heritage more acutely, approaching it not through a purely historical lens, but rather through a mythological and emotional framework that connects macro and micro history, personal and collective, geopolitics and intimacy.
Curated by Mara Gladstone, “Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig” presents an immersive poetic journey by Manila-based visual artist and filmmaker John Quison, who creates a seamless multimedia format of new works across 20 free-standing paintings, small sculptures, sound and moving images. Just a few rooms away from the Arsenal’s main gallery, the site presented a spatial and conceptual challenge for Cuisson, a challenge he welcomed. The challenge extended to financing, which was handled with characteristic Filipino ingenuity: the large-scale 3D paintings, which function structurally within the installation, were designed so that the entire exhibition fit into a single shipping container.
Gladstone describes the experience of entering the pavilion as stepping into a ship: “You enter the pavilion and step into an abstract skyline made up of paintings. Wherever you look, you encounter variations of the same scenario – groups of paintings, screens placed in different positions, where different films are being shown at the same time.”
The project explores the sea as a living repository of stories of maritime labor, migration and colonialism, as well as kinship forged on the water. “It’s about thinking about the sea as a living archive of underwater history – invisible maritime labour, migration, environmental fragility, kinship. The project tries to pay attention to frequencies that are ignored in the world,” Cuisson tells the Observer as we walk through the pavilion.
The show centers around the Filipino sailor, a prominent figure in Filipino culture and identity, with deep roots in the country’s relationship with water and the archipelago. However, as Gladstone points out, in the broader cultural imagination, the Filipino sailor has always been a side character – whether in Moby Dick or Starship troopers-despite being a silent force in colonialism, global trade and economic systems for centuries. “They still fuel global economies today. I think one in three, or one in four, are Filipino sailors, which means almost every artwork in the Venice Biennale has been handled by a Filipino at some point,” she says.
In the context of the biennale’s theme, “Minor Keys,” it is a minor story, and in fact structurally it is a major story. According to Gladstone, the project does not aim to speak for the seafarers from a political standpoint, but rather to humanize them as individuals shaped by love, sacrifice and migration – experiences that resonate widely across the Filipino and global diaspora. “This is not a social justice project — we don’t pretend to speak for seafarers. What we want to do is take this cultural imaginary of the Filipino seafarer and instill in it a kind of identity that we can connect to, as people — people who love, work hard, and sacrifice. Almost every Filipino has a family member who emigrated and stayed away for long periods of time. It’s a universal story.”
While the title evokes romantic love, which is partly represented here, the sea is not necessarily romantic for Filipino sailors, it separates and connects at the same time. “That’s the challenge: How do you maintain relationships, how do you maintain longing and desire across distance?” Gladstone points out. “This is where kinship gets complicated.”
The installation itself is equally complex, a multi-dimensional choreography with four films playing simultaneously on different screens in reference to the shifting perspectives one might take on a ship sailing toward an endless horizon. It is one of the few national pavilions that operates in this way, as its structure resists singular meaning in favor of accumulation and relationship. Rather than constructing an individual narrative, the fragmented and evocative elements derive meaning only from their relationships to each other. Cuisson wanted to work around the idea of frequency. “When you enter the space, there is no single narrative,” he explains. “Instead, you encounter fragmented narratives, structures, reflections, and openings.” “It takes time to get to the concept or idea behind the work. This is where the secondary register comes in – paying attention to the low-frequency ideas underneath the main narrative.”
This novel unfolds through four interconnected points of view—the sailor, his mother (a shaman), his mutant lover, and the ocean itself as a sentient presence—in a strange love story that expands beyond conventional representation. “There is no competing narrative. The four films – the sailor, his lover, his mother, and the sea of echoes – work together, sequentially but also simultaneously, so you experience different points of view simultaneously,” says Gladstone, noting how meaning develops through accumulation and relationship in this non-hierarchical structure, with recurring themes such as love, longing, sacrifice, and the search for home spread across the various elements of the composition.
“The work asks something of the viewer. You have to sit with it, pay attention, look at the gaps, the silent hesitations. The meaning emerges slowly. And that, for me, is the understatement,” Cuisson notes, adding that this is a suite that requires time to experience.
The first three films were made during the pandemic, far from isolation, longing and sadness. Loosely inspired by Jean Genet Quirrell— a book and figure of particular interest to Koisson — the work reimagines its source material to challenge Eurocentric narratives and underrepresented identities. Carrel, the Filipino sailor, also became 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 is still a very conservative country where traditional Catholicism is still strong. “There are very few representations of the queer Filipino sailor. Why couldn’t he be gay? Why couldn’t he have a trans lover? Why couldn’t he have a shamanic mother?” Cuisson considers that this was a symbolic and crucial choice to highlight these young histories.
Quison has been researching Philippine maritime history, including early Filipino communities in the United States, and found that Filipino sailors who jumped ship formed communities in Louisiana in the 17th century, during the age of the galleon. “Later, their descendants developed shrimp drying practices that became part of American cuisine. These dates are real, but I’m not a historian. I’m using them to construct a narrative.”
At the same time, the figure of the mother is linked to a pre-colonial spirituality that was later erased by Spanish colonialism. Through it, Coyson points to 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 techniques rooted in an epistemology of interconnectedness with nature.
In the film, a mother fears for her son’s safety at sea, and the images are drawn in part from real footage of piracy included by Cuisson. “My films are experimental documentaries, and I borrow from real footage, including material from sailors themselves,” he explains. Historical research and documentation blend seamlessly with contemporary sailor 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. “The sailors upload videos to keep in touch with their families. They dance, they document their lives. It’s a way to show care, to show that they are still alive. It becomes part of the research and the narrative,” explains Cuisson.
Cuisson’s practice works through memorial and imaginative parts, collecting and integrating symbolic and evocative parts into new dialectical sequences of meaning and myth-making. “In editing, I collect parts and arrive at the final composition,” he explains, noting that drawing works the same way for him – a memory of a surface or material incorporated into the work. “The relationship between drawing and the moving image is not direct, but there is evidence…they are individual, but related to each other.”
Silver mussels are scattered on the ground. The idea of “mussel thinking” is the main conceptual framework through which Cuisson engages with the myth that informs the entire pavilion. The mussel’s behavior becomes a metaphor and a method, as filtration, agglomeration, and sedimentation become ways of understanding memory, history, and relationship across time. “The mussel physically creates new life through its depth threads, filtering the ocean—absorbing both good and evil—and through this process, generates new life. They sediment, they form sediments of memory and history, and they come together. So this becomes a conceptual and physical metaphor for how the story develops,” Gladstone explains, noting how this reflects the Filipino sailor or overseas worker who must remain resilient in the midst of 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 living space that connects communities and sustains forms of belonging. Bringing to Venice a powerful narrative of the Philippines as an archipelago shaped by the realities of geography, migration, and labor, it foregrounds the human stories that move across international shipping routes—and are shaped in many ways—and by the world’s most economically important but culturally invisible labor forces, which have been overlooked for too long in global history. That this practice now seems urgent is inseparable from today’s geopolitical and economic dynamics, as shifting powers and alliances continue to redefine the global landscape.
