Assi Abogado and Nathaniel Enriquez
Vacuum-sealed Filipino food items in clear plastic, metal rings, steel wires
254 x 229 cm
Sandblast on mirror glass
2025
What began as a necessity for storage, transport, and survival has shaped taste profiles unique to Filipino cuisine. The work reflects on how time is inscribed in taste: the sourness of fermentation, the texture of drying, the salt of curing, the tenderness of slow marination. Abroad, Filipinos hold on to these tastes and textures as a remembrance of home.
The sculpture draws from the economic logic of tingi. Here, various preserved Filipino foods are portioned into small, single-use, vacuum-sealed plastics. Tingi ("small amount," *by piece") embodies both resilience and uncertainty: buying in small quantities because bulk is unaffordable, choosing quick fixes to hunger over long-term nourishment. Plastic becomes both survival and burden; its portability and affordability reflect systems of disposability-of material, of labor, of migrant lives stretched by time. By enlarging and monumentalizing these packets. the work draws focus on the economic conditions that make survival possible only through small purchased portions.
On front of the suspended sculpture, the phrase Uwing Uwi Na Ako ("I am itching to go home") etched onto a mirror captures the sentimentality behind the artists' grocery habits as Filipino immigrants. The purchase of Filipino goods abroad and perhaps the self-learning of preservation methods becomes an expression of yearning and homesickness, where taste becomes a way of returning home.
Un-break My Heart: Inquiring the States of How We Miss Each Other in a World We Cannot Afford is commissioned and curated by Bernice De Los Reyes and Augustine Paredes and is part of Tindahan Sa Tahanan Co., A group exhibition for Alserkal Avenue’s What The Food last October 25 - 26, 2025.
Photographs courtesy of Pyong Sumaria.