The country's visionary architect and the flagship company of the country work together on the current Expo 2025 Osaka in Japan and bring the best of Filipino design and dance through the installation of hand -woven plates made by master craftsmen from all over the country. The installation will be issued until October 13th.
By Anne Stephanie Nilo
In the center of the Filipino Pavilion of the Expo 2025 Osaka as “woven” is an installation of the Filipino architect Carlo Calma – and a transformation of 694 m². From first -class real estate in a physical Paean to the Filipino culture and craftsmanship. And what a tribute it is!
“About a thousand rattan pieces were sent from Cebu. We had to pay and create a more efficient tree method that starts from the tip,” said Calma when he described the logistics when sending the many parts that formed this massive installation.
This 12-meter-high-hand-made structure is art and architecture in movement and clearly Filipino. With over 200 hand-woven tables and more than a thousand woven rattan parts, Calma's boundless imagination has increased the craft of weaving on a common base to a brave architectural statement, which is the entry facade in Philippine architecture using rattan and live artificial facade through ballet philippines.
“Most of the footwork was the coordination of the 2,331 Weber from 121 web communities across the country – which made them one of the greatest cooperation between the Filipino community weavers in a project and the largest collection of Philippine tissue in one location,” explained Calma.
The design process did not begin in the salon, but from a long immersive journey to the web communities throughout the archipelago – from South Cotabato to Cebu to the Cordilleras. For Calma, design does not exist in a vacuum, and its architectural practice has always been informed and shaped by cultures, traditions and real experience. Through the journey from north to south, he taught the timeless traditions of weaving and enabled him to fully suck the culture in these communities and to personally meet the craftsmen and textile artists who would finally work together to create this architectural masterpiece under his direction.
“This trip was deeply revealing and enabled us to combine with the cultural wealth and the unused potential of our own craft traditions. It not only informed the material and design decisions for the pavilion, but continued to inspire our practice,” he said.
Calma and his employees have the limits of architecture with this installation, which is dynamic and fluid as water, avoid the rigid design rules by merging dance and design on the Expo 2025 and avoiding the limits of architecture.
“For me, the architecture should be adaptive and conceptually grounded, while they consistently examine the blurred boundaries between art and architecture,” he added.
And when Calma brought in ballet philippines, he created a rich visual wall carpet of the threads that bind Filipinos, an architectural expression of the kett and weaving, which tells the history of the strength and persistence of the Filipinos and the role of culture and art in the association.
“It is not just a rich visual motive. We imagine a pavilion that not only shows culture, but also actively embodies them through materials, services and immersive experiences,” he explains. “We have woven these things together with live music in order to create a holistic experience to create what almost makes it a living and breathing space. I believe that this multisensory approach is something that I personally put on the table,” he added.
Calma, with ballet philippines and the weavers that he collected, not only built a breathtaking representation of Filipino talents of world class, but also a total visual experience that lives and breathes and is carefully handmade.
