2001 / Intermedia / Variable dimensions / Artists: Alice and Lucinda (Lena Cobangbang and Yasmin Sison)

Primary Destinations is a project launched by Alice and Lucinda (A&L) in line with Space Meeting Place, an exhibition held on 6-30 Sep 2001, which focused on “three-dimensional artworks, extending ideas about space, context, and a sense of place” (Labrador 2001). Aside from A&L, the roster of participating artists included Roberto Chabet, Juan Alcazaren, Ringo Bunoan, Bernardo Pacquing, and Gerardo Tan, who set up site-specific works in the galleries of the original Ayala Museum building located along Makati Ave.

The point of reference in Primary Destinations is the Ayala Museum’s permanent dioramas presenting vignettes from Philippine history, spanning the precolonial period up until the 1986 EDSA Revolt. The dioramas were carved by sculptors mostly from Paete, Laguna, building a total of 60 tableaus from 1974 to 2011. Alice and Lucinda, the alter egos of Lena Cobangbang and Yasmin Sison, represented themselves as miniature tourists symbolically encroaching upon the museum’s spaces. One component of their work consisted of asking architecture students to build a maquette of the gallery space within which the A&L miniatures were placed. Another component of the project involved inserting other wooden polychromed figurines of A&L as tourists intervening in the dioramas of the Ayala Museum. Blending organically with the tableau’s design and configuration, the wooden miniatures of A&L were photographed, and prints were compiled in a mini photo album as part of the exhibition. In the diorama depicting the rice terraces, one of the miniatures was rendered in a squat position and positioned beside an Ifugao as if she were one of the workers on the terraces, this while the other tourist looks over the unfolding scene. In the densely packed diorama alluding to the EDSA Revolt, A&L became almost indistinguishable from the sea of figures converging in protest.

Primary Destinations draws attention to how the museum has become a tourist enclave. It is a quirky commentary on the museum’s tendency to function as a treasure trove and as a powerful institution disseminating grand, essentialist narratives. It is an evocation of the tourist gaze and one’s partial encounter with history through the representational mode of the diorama. The three-dimensional images’ translation into postcards and the initial plan of installing the whole set of figures in the museum shop was an attempt to reinforce the act of acquisition of souvenirs as an act of collecting that is normative for both the tourist and the museum. Primary Destinations is consistent with the practice of A&L, who play with notions of parallel universes, time travel, and alternative fictions. The wooden sculptures and postcards were exhibited at the University of the Philippines Vargas Museum as part of A&L: The Parallel Lives Museum, 2012, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila as part of The Philippine Contemporary, 2013.