Sa kabila ng tabing lamang sa panahong ito

AN ASSEMBLY OF AMORPHOUS BLOBS recurs throughout the Pavilion and its collateral materials. The blobs allude to cloud formations, droplets of water, or else graphic representations of small stones. Adding texture to these amorphous blobs, an overlay of moiré is used. Moiré is a pattern of repeating horizontal lines that disrupts how light travels and is typically used for analog animation through optical illusion. Throughout materials related to the Pavilion, these blobs transform and play out a range of design dispositions: clouds float across spaces (as in the catalog cover), droplets leave marks on surfaces (on the inside pages), stones displace textual material (as footnotes). In some instances, this design element becomes all three at once. The moiré translates the potential of Puli’s tabing into graphic terms: as the moiré cloud hovers across texts and images it transforms them—interrupting our typical ways of apprehending them.

Unlike the usual approach to visual identity that relies on a singular image, the design for the visual identity of the exhibition Sa kabila ng tabing lamang sa panahong ito / Waiting just beyond the curtain of this age offers a metamorphic motif that recurs in different guises throughout. In considering the aspirations of the Pavilion itself as an encompassing scenography, the conceptualization of a visual identity as motif presents a compelling conversation. Motifs are atmospheric. They exist alongside and surrounding material, constituting an ambience, a mood, a milieu. In this sense they are environmental. Instead of creating a conspicuous central image around which all visual elements revolve, the exhibition identity leans into an amorphous and ever formative ornament, transforming in relation to the context in which it finds itself.