Sulog

Contemporary Filipino Architecture is at the nexus of interconnected and intersecting forces.  Once imagined as limited within the confines of the Philippines as a geographical setting, Filipino Architecture is recast as the continuous flow of people, places, and processes.

“Sulog”, a Cebuano term that refers to “water currents”, encapsulates the dynamic ebbs and flows of Filipino Architecture that is born of an archipelagic setting and whose sense of becoming is enmeshed within crosscurrents of multiple flows and network exchanges.

The exhibit is inspired by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s conception of “Global Cultural Flow” (1990) as an intersecting transnational network of exchange between people, goods, economics, politics, and ideas. He suggests that we need to understand these cultural flows across geo-political boundaries through the five dimensions of ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes. Following this framework, we can then also understand that the production, consumption, and mediation of architecture are embedded within the ever-dynamic currents of movement that could never be limited to just one idea of territory.  Thus, we can think of architecture as not simply emerging from a single nation or country but instead as a confluence of cultural exchanges occurring across time and space.

National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) in collaboration with Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM)

Opening: September 19, 2025, 7 p.m.