Through the installation ‘Sea of Love,’ which tells the story of the sea from four perspectives—the sailor, his mother, his lover, and the sea of echoes—Philippine artist Jon Cuyson is creating a new kind of visual experience at the Venice Biennale. The work explores a spatial environment shaped by the logic of the sea, using painting, sculpture, sound, and moving images.
While the theme of the artwork exhibited at the Biennale centres on and humanises Philippine labour that fuels the waterways of global commerce—the lives and longings of the seafarer, his family, ships, and molluscs—the artist is taking it into otherworldly realms of exploration.
Jon Cuyson has explored the intersections of identity, migration, labour, and ecological entanglement for more than 20 years, frequently negotiating the shifting lines between reality and fiction. He established Everyday Productions in 2010, a conceptual platform that serves as a methodology and laboratory for art, film, and design experimentation. Memory Modules, linked pieces that serve as partial archives for buried histories, seafaring labour, and shards of belonging, influence his designs. In more recent times, he has created a framework called Mussel Thinking, in which mussels serve as metaphors for filtration, sedimentation, and clustering, as well as ecological collaborators. This approach expands his work with queer ecologies and wet ontologies by emphasising porousness, caring, and dependency.
Cuyson creates immersive settings that rethink how nature, memory, and desire interact across individual and societal histories. To create environments that are both sensitive and transformative, his work frequently crosses the lines between art and design, installation and scenography, and fiction and documentation. He presently resides and works in Manila, Philippines, after earning his MFA in painting from Columbia University in New York (2010). In May 2026, Jon Cuyson will formally represent the Philippines at the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.
As part of the interview series, a conversation with Venice Biennale artists, Abirpothi, featuring Philippine artist Jon Cuyson. The artist discusses in detail his work and his presence in the Venice Biennale.
Q: Your practice consistently returns to the sea—not merely as a landscape but as an archive of labour, migration, memory, and desire. What first drew you to the ocean as the central conceptual space through which you think and make art?
Jon Cuyson: One of my earliest memories of encountering the sea directly comes from childhood visits with my grandfather to Manila Bay. At the time, I did not yet understand the vast systems of labour, trade, and migration those ships represented, but the image stayed with me: vessels drifting across distance, and small living forms gripping the surfaces that resisted the tide. Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig grew from these entanglements of memory, movement, and maritime life.
My work is closely tied to Filipino history because the Philippines’ history is inseparable from the sea. The country is an archipelago, and for centuries, trade, colonisation, migration, and labour all moved through maritime routes. From the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade to today’s global shipping industry, the Philippines has always been connected to the world through ocean routes.
Today, the Philippines is one of the world’s largest suppliers of seafarers, and millions of Filipinos work overseas. Many Filipino families are shaped by migration and distance – people leave, work abroad, send money home, and return years later. So, for many Filipinos, the sea is not just a landscape or a symbol of nature; it is part of an economic, labour, and emotional system. It is tied to work, separation, and the idea of home existing in multiple places at once.
In my work, I try to think of the sea not only as nature but also as a historical and economic space where global trade, labour, migration, and memory intersect. The ships that cross oceans carry goods, but they also carry workers and stories that often remain invisible. The fictional character Kerel in my films is partly a way to think about these invisible lives, like the seafarers, migrants, and workers whose movements sustain global economies but are rarely represented in history or art.
So my work is really about the sea as a space shaped by movement, movement of goods, the movement of people, the movement of history, and the lives that exist within those movements.
Q: You describe your methodology as “Mussel Thinking,” borrowing from the ecological behaviour of mussels. How did this concept emerge, and how has it transformed your understanding of artistic practice beyond metaphor?
Jon Cuyson: I describe mussels as a motif and metaphor because they recur visually and conceptually throughout the work. I’m aware of the prominent Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers’ important use of mussel shells as a form of linguistic and institutional critique tied to national identity and language. My engagement begins from a different place. Mussels are part of my everyday memory. They were food before they became material or method, prepared by my grandmother, shared at home, and tied to care and sustenance. That familiarity shapes how I approach them now.
I think of mussels less as symbols and more as guides. Their ways of attaching, clustering, and filtering mirror forms of Filipino endurance and relational survival within global maritime systems. Like mussels on ship hulls, Filipino seafarers sustain global commerce while remaining largely unseen, carried by infrastructures that depend on their labour.
In my work, the mussel extends beyond metaphor into method or what I refer to as Mussel Thinking. It is an orientation shaped through practice rather than theory, a way of understanding how bodies, materials, and histories persist through proximity, accumulation, and endurance. Through the mussel’s ecological behaviour, its capacity to filter, to hold sediment, and to survive within polluted and extractive environments, the work shifts attention away from spectacle and toward relation, survival, and responsibility. In this sense, the mussel operates simultaneously as a motif, metaphor, and guide, shaping how the exhibition understands labour, kinship, and resilience today.
Q: Sea of Love humanises Filipino seafarers through intimacy, kinship, and longing rather than through documentary activism. Why was it important for you to approach maritime labour through affect and emotion instead of direct political representation?
Jon Cuyson: The installation for Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig holds a deliberate tension. It speaks to intimacy, kinship, and longing, while acknowledging the sea as a vast, often unforgiving environment shaped by global maritime labour. For many Filipinos, the sea is less a romantic horizon than a site of separation, a passageway marked by prolonged absence, risk, and endurance. In this exhibition, I am interested in what persists quietly within these large systems. Filipino seafarers move through global economies that rely heavily on their labour, yet rarely register their lives beyond function. Here, the sea becomes a witness to small, often overlooked gestures of memory, attachment, and survival that unfold alongside danger and displacement.
Rather than resolving these contradictions, Sea of Love stays with them. It attends to minor intensities, the fragile, everyday acts through which belonging is sustained, to suggest how tenderness survives within precarious conditions, carried across water and time. I think that by focusing on these minor intensities, the work can be seen as political.
Q: The fictional figure of Kerel has accompanied your work for more than a decade. How has this character evolved, and in what ways does Kerel allow you to tell stories that conventional documentary or autobiography cannot?
Jon Cuyson: The Kerel Trilogy began as a way for me to think about the sea not only as geography, but as a space of movement, labour, desire, and transformation. Kerel is a fictional queer Filipino seafarer who travels across time, across ports, and across different maritime histories. He is not meant to be a single character with a fixed biography, but rather a vessel through which multiple narratives can pass – migration, labour, masculinity, queerness, longing, and displacement. In many ways, Kerel is a composite figure, shaped by the histories of Filipino seafarers, overseas workers, and migrants whose lives unfold across oceans and distances.
Personally, Kerel began as a figure through which I projected my own migrant experiences, then he evolved into a mythological character who exists cinematically between worlds, representative of ways to think about how people survive and remain connected across time and space.
Q: Your work brings together painting, film, sculpture, installation, and artist books without privileging one medium over another. How do these different forms converse with one another, and what does this interdisciplinary language make possible?
Jon Cuyson: The Artiglierie at the Arsenale played a crucial role in shaping the installation’s conception and experience. We approached the space not as a neutral container, but as an active participant in the work, one already marked by histories of maritime labour, production, and movement. The Sea of Love installation responds to the Arsenale’s square proportions, stone surfaces, and industrial scale by emphasising horizontality, circulation, and bodily navigation. In this context, painting is not treated as a discrete object but as an organising system that produces space rather than occupies it. The freestanding painting panels define boundaries, regulate sightlines, and choreograph how viewers move through the pavilion. Scaled to the openings of shipping containers, these painting panels quietly reference the infrastructures of global maritime circulation, trade, labour, and displacement, without directly illustrating them. Film, sound, reflection, and presence are activated through this painted structure rather than added to it.
The installation operates across multiple spatial registers at once. It functions as a fragmented horizon that organises orientation and distance, as a vessel shaped by movement and waiting, and as a deconstructed civic space. In Venice, a city formed by water, thresholds, and public squares. This approach reframes gathering as something porous and contingent rather than monumental. Viewers are positioned as spectators facing images, but also as bodies moving within a working system. Lighting follows the same logic. The glow of the light box and the screens, reflections on metallic painting surfaces, and the ambient qualities of the Arsenale create a shifting field of light and shadow. This encourages slowness and sustained attention, allowing meaning to emerge through proximity and pacing. Overall, the audience experience is one of inhabitation rather than observation alone. The space asks viewers to move, pause, and orient themselves within an environment where painting, film, and sculpture operate together, holding fragments in relation, much like a mussel bed stabilises and filters what passes through it.
Q: Queerness in your work appears not only through identity but also through structure, time, and ecology. How do queer ways of thinking reshape your understanding of history, memory, and belonging?
Jon Cuyson: My practice emerges from queer and postcolonial ecologies as they are lived and negotiated through memory, labour, relation, and movement. In Sea of Love, painting, film, and sculpture do not function as separate disciplines but as interdependent systems. Painting operates as an organising structure that produces space and choreographs movement; film extends this structure through duration and rhythm; and sculpture holds traces of use, intimacy, and labour. Meaning does not arrive through a single narrative but through proximity, overlap, and drift.
I began as a painter shaped by multiple and overlapping influences, drawn early on to both the discipline of hard-edged abstraction and the expressive potential of material. This led me to understand painting not simply as an image, but as a flexible system capable of absorbing memory, labour, and cultural reference.
Over time, this way of thinking expanded naturally into film and installation, where concerns with surface, pacing, and composition unfold through sound, movement, and spatial encounter. My approach to filmmaking mirrors how I work in abstraction: filming begins as a visceral, responsive act, and coherence is shaped later through editing, much like how a painting resolves through accumulated gestures.
In my work, queer ecology is not only about queer identity, but about relational ways of living – about bodies, environments, and histories that exist in constant movement, transformation, and interdependence, much like life in the sea.
Q: Many of your installations refuse linear storytelling, instead asking viewers to assemble fragmented narratives over time. What kind of spectator are you hoping to cultivate through this slower, more participatory experience?
Jon Cuyson: I hope to engage viewers who are open to taking a moment to slow down. Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig is not asking to be fully understood in one moment. It is an exhibition meant to be inhabited through listening, sensing, wandering, and allowing fragments to surface in their own time. If there is a guiding principle, it is this: to pay attention to what usually moves quietly beneath the surface, labour, memory, longing, and connection, and to recognise how these subtle forces continue to shape our shared world. The work hopes to offer a space where viewers can pause, sense, and carry something with them as they leave, even if they cannot immediately name it. In that sense, the Pavilion is less an answer than an invitation: to stay with what drifts, what endures, and what binds us across water, distance, and time.
Q: The Philippines has often been defined through colonial histories or nationalist narratives. Your work proposes an ‘archipelagic’ way of thinking instead. How does this perspective challenge conventional ideas of nationhood and identity?
Jon Cuyson: The pavilion is a complicated form, especially at a time when national identities can feel increasingly fixed or confrontational. For me, it doesn’t have to resolve that tension. I think of it instead as a porous space or one that can hold different histories, voices, and conditions without collapsing them into a single narrative.
The Philippines itself is an archipelago, shaped by movement – of water, people, and histories. That condition makes it difficult to think of identity as stable or singular. So rather than presenting a fixed image of the nation, the work tries to open it up, allowing both its specificity and its connections to broader experiences of displacement, care, and survival to remain visible.
In that sense, the pavilion becomes less about representation and more about relation or about how a nation is continuously formed through movement, encounter, and exchange.
Q: Representing a nation at the Venice Biennale can easily become an exercise in cultural branding. How did you negotiate the tension between representing the Philippines and resisting fixed national identities?
Jon Cuyson: I see Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig as building on the strong foundation laid by previous Philippine Pavilions, while shifting the register of how history and identity are approached. Since the country’s return in 2015, the Pavilion has often addressed national narratives through bold conceptual frameworks and clearly articulated positions. My work continues that engagement, but moves toward a quieter, more intimate scale. Rather than presenting a singular historical argument, Sea of Love works through fragments, atmospheres, and lived conditions. It looks at maritime labour, queerness, and migration not as themes to be explained, but as realities that are repeated, felt, and often submerged. Painting, film, and sculpture function together as a slow-moving system that asks viewers to pause, listen, and drift rather than arrive at a fixed conclusion.
On a personal level, this approach reflects how I understand Philippine histories, as something carried through bodies, objects, and movements across water, rather than contained within official narratives. The work does not attempt to speak for the nation, but to trace how the Philippines circulates globally through port cities, shipping routes, and diasporic lives. If Sea of Love departs from earlier presentations, it is in its insistence on operating in minor keys. It proposes that Philippine presence at the Biennale can also be articulated through subtlety, endurance, and relational depth, through what persists quietly beneath the surface, yet continues to move the world.
Q: Your exhibition foregrounds Filipino seafarers, whose labour sustains global commerce while remaining largely invisible. Do you see your work as intervening in the politics of visibility, or are you interested in something more complex than simply making the invisible visible?
Jon Cuyson: Perhaps both. Being presently based in the Philippines keeps my work anchored in specific places, memories, and relationships, but it also makes the global immediately present. Maritime labour, migration, and circulation are not abstract ideas here; they shape everyday life, from port cities to families with members working at sea. I don’t experience the local and the global as opposites; they are constantly overlapping. In my work, I begin from particular memories, materials, and encounters, but I allow them to open outward rather than stand in for something universal. A gesture of labour, an object carried across water, or a fragment of sound can hold both personal meaning and a wider resonance. I trust that specificity creates connection, not limitation. For a global audience, the work is designed to be experienced first through sensation, through pacing, sound, reflection, and movement, before explanation. Viewers don’t need to know the Philippines in detail to enter the work. What they encounter are shared conditions shaped by globalisation, movement, waiting, separation, and endurance, before any narrative is fixed. This Experience is anchored by freestanding painting panels with punctured, reflective surfaces that form an immersive field, including film and sculpture, allowing local histories and memories to emerge through movement and perception rather than explanation.
For me, balance comes from staying attentive to where the work is made and who it comes from, while remaining open to how it might travel, be read, and felt elsewhere. The sea makes that possible. It connects places without flattening them, allowing difference and relation to coexist.
Q: Memory Modules have become an important organising principle in your practice. Why do you think fragmented archives and incomplete memories are more productive than complete historical narratives?
Jon Cuyson: I think that because fragments allow flexibility, they produce possibilities. My projects are shaped by what I call Memory Modules, or interconnected works that function as partial archives, holding fragments of submerged histories, maritime labour, and forms of belonging. From the Manila Men, among the earliest documented Filipino sailors, to contemporary seafarers working on container ships today, Filipino presence at sea has been continuous, though rarely centred in how history is told. These histories are not distant or abstract to me; I have family members on both sides who have worked at sea. Filipino seafarers continue to crew ships that move goods, images, and artworks across oceans, including those that arrive at international exhibitions such as the Biennale. In that sense, the Biennale itself is already entangled with Filipino maritime labour, even when that labour remains largely unseen.
Rather than assembling a single, authoritative narrative, I work through fragments, sounds, objects, rhythms of work, moments of waiting and departure, allowing each project to hold memory without resolving it. This modular approach reflects how these histories persist: quietly, repeatedly, and often beneath the surface. Working this way also makes space for queer lives within maritime worlds, where identity is shaped less by visibility than by proximity, negotiation, and endurance. What emerges is not a heroic account, but a sense of continuity of lives that have long moved the world precisely by remaining adaptive, present, and partially out of sight.
Q: Your installations often blur the boundaries between fiction and historical research. What responsibilities—and freedoms—does fiction offer when engaging with histories of colonialism, migration, and labour?
Jon Cuyson: Fiction grants us the freedom to fabulate, but engaging with specific histories demands a critical awareness of what was documented—and what was omitted. When navigating complex political, cultural, and anthropological histories, rigorous research becomes essential. Ultimately, it is this grounding in historical fact that empowers fiction to meaningfully question, subvert, and reframe the narrative.
Q: There is a striking material sensitivity in your work, from resin mussels to industrial hardware and marine debris. How do materials themselves carry memory, and how do they become collaborators in your storytelling?
Jon Cuyson: I view materials as historical witnesses that carry the specific traumas and socio-political weights of the spaces they inhabit. Cast objects such as industrial hardware, marine debris, and mussels are transformed into vital collaborators in my storytelling, rather than mere props. They allow me to anchor the abstract realities of maritime labour in a tangible form, utilising “mussel thinking” to map out the dualities of isolation and resilience among Filipino seafarers.
Q: The Biennale’s theme, In Minor Keys, resonates with your interest in overlooked lives, subtle gestures, and quiet histories. Do you think contemporary art needs to become more attentive to these ‘minor frequencies’ in an era dominated by spectacle and immediacy?
Jon Cuyson: Yes.
Q: Looking back over your practice—from Kereland Memory Modules to Sea of Love—what questions continue to haunt you as an artist? And where do you imagine your exploration of maritime histories, queer ecologies, and oceanic memory will lead next?
Jon Cuyson: Rather than being haunted by fixed questions, I try to remain open to the inquiries that reveal themselves to me as I move through the world. Operating from a place of “not knowing” is essential to my survival as an artist—it ensures that my engagement with oceanic and queer ecologies remains a living, breathing process. I choose not to predict where these histories will take me next; instead, I am stepping forward with genuine excitement to discover it along the way.
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