Date: 29 July – 17 September 2026
Project Space
Francis Olvez Wilshaw / Research Practice Residency 2026
Named after the Filipino dessert meaning “mix–mix”, Halo-Halo explores casting as both a sculptural process and a way of assembling speculative mythologies from fragments of inherited history, memory, material culture and place.
The sculptures incorporate culturally significant materials, including ube, calamansi, coconut husks, candied jellies and bamboo. Through casting, these everyday materials become carriers of labour, landscape, spirituality and cultural inheritance.
The ‘finished’ sculpture gestates enclosed within its plaster mould jacket and reflects on the historical term “half-caste”. By interrupting the casting process, the works challenge inherited ideas of incompleteness and instead propose mixed identity as a continual process of formation, translation and becoming. Family photographs, oral histories, Indigenous Filipino creation stories, colonial histories and cast-off domestic objects are brought together to form new, speculative narratives that embrace contradiction and transformation.
An accompanying sound work extends this process through listening. Percussive rhythms inspired by the Filipino folk dance Tinikling are combined with field recordings made in the Philippines, including conversations with family, boats crossing water, karaoke and the sounds of everyday life. Together, the sculptures and sound work move between personal memory and collective history, creating a layered landscape of identity, place and cultural inheritance.
