At Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, Philippine Pavilion sheds light on Tripa de Gallina

The Philippine Pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale puts the spotlight in Tripa de Gallina, the longest estero in Metro Manila.

The Tripa de Gallina serves as a tributary among larger bodies of water, including the Manila Bay. It functions mainly as a channel to mitigate flooding and drain water from various parts of the city, but over the years, it has eventually become congested with residents and, subsequently, polluted with trash.

At the Philippine Pavilion, located at the National Pavilion of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia stands "Tripa de Gallina: Guts of Estuary," an exhibition by The Architecture Collective, together with architects Sam Domingo and Choie Funk, that addresses the unsustainable environmental and social circumstances in the area and offers a diagnosis of the water’s condition and a prognosis of the people’s future.

Featuring a bamboo structure that serves as a place of gathering and investigation, the Pavilion inspects the estuary’s guts: a flawed ecology of humans, waters, and dregs.

"It serves as a buoy for this mesh to be carefully unraveled and sustainably mended through a gritty collaborative action among these entangled actants, in the name of resilience," read a portion of a statement from the Philippine Arts in Venice Biennale Coordinating Committee.

The installation also features windows that provide a screen on which moving archival materials play out. The narrative leads to the center when an immersive audio-visual encounter with the estero lurks day and night, where both videos were directed by filmmaker and educator Jag Garcia.

From the groundwork, a lively prospect of the state of the entire ecology is imagined through the structure’s ethnographic projections.

“Through the exhibition, the world will have the opportunity to understand the realities faced by Filipinos and realize that this issue is something that they too are facing, potentially cultivating more in-depth and meaningful discussions that [lead] to collective action and a more sustainable future,” said National Commission of Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Chair and Philippine Pavilion Commissioner Victorino Mapa Manalo.

"Hopefully, it's the thing that makes people realize that we should have a relationship with water,” said Noel Narciso, the project coordinator for The Architecture Collective.

“I see it is a return to the water. Water is becoming less accessible every day. And I think if we don't return to it, or put it as a guiding principle in design, which is the core resource of humanity, then it is of consequence.”

The Philippine participation at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia is a collaborative undertaking of the NCCA, the Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Office of Senate President Pro Tempore Loren Legarda.

The exhibit opened last May 18 and will run until November 26 in Venice, Italy.

— Hermes Joy Tunac/LA, GMA Integrated News