Photographed by Renzo Navarro
Set in a future with harsher climates and technologically mediated lives, Bianca Carague’s Technospoonism reimagines traditional Filipino dining.
In the Philippines, environmental problems plague the nation with the constant threat of pollution, deforestation, climate change, and biodiversity loss. Given the current crises the country faces, it may be hard to imagine a better tomorrow. But in Bianca Carague’s Technospoonism, not only do we have a future in which humanity endures, but also one in which communal gatherings and celebrations are still practiced.
A part of this year’s Benilde Open Design + Art exhibition, Technospoonism reimagines the kamayan, the Filipino practice of eating using one’s bare hands. Set in a future that’s altered by climate and technologically mediated, Carague imagines the practice evolving through a collection of jewelry that doubles as cutlery and tableware. Cuffs serve as plates, rings as forks, and pendants as vessels.
The concept came from different things. First, her desire to create objects again, her interest in dining practices, and her desire to work with chefs. “There’s not really one linear way to tell you why I wanted to work on this, or how I thought of it in the first place,” she shares. “[It] was a slow simmer of random ideas and interests, and things that I wanted to do in my mind.”
For the jewelry pieces, the design began with the idea of creating pieces that acted as extensions of the hand and body. She shares that she had “more of an idea of the feeling of the experience,” describing her goal of making it feel “weird,” “futuristic,” and “absurd.” “I didn’t know what that was going to look like exactly. It took some time,” she says.
Led by these feelings, she began by taking inspiration from Batok tattoos, the traditional hand-tapped tattooing practice from the Cordillera region. Taking the symbols for the sun and the moon, Carague tied these in with her concept. “Tattoos, they’re permanent, whereas these pieces I was making, they’re pieces you can wear, you can change, you can remove,” she says. “That comparison of permanence on the skin versus mutable, changeable, and adaptable, I feel that’s how I see survival in culture. It’s something that relies on adaptation rather than rigidity and permanence.”
After a few sketches, she created models with clay and 3D printing, then arrived at a more streamlined collection. But the story doesn’t end with just the jewelry, but with a collaboration. To explore how the pieces could be utilized in her imagined future, Carague collaborated with chef Kelvin Pundavela, a key member of Now Now Canteen’s “reNOWn” gastronomy team.
If the future of the Philippine climate is harsher, certain crops may not be readily available, theoretically making hardier crops such as tomatoes, potatoes, ube, and kamote more abundant. Seaweed may also be more abundant, which they incorporated by turning it into agar-agar, suspending ingredients in the shelf-stable gelatin alternative. “The lore got deeper, and it got bigger when I brought other people in, even just to document the project,” she says. “This is really what it’s about for me, you know. It’s about just putting an idea out there and letting people run with it and see where it goes, and watching it grow bigger.”
In her view, the project itself is neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the future. “I think it’s just taking a current situation and imagining a different way to be,” she says. “At the end of the day, you can’t have a future if you can’t imagine it first, right?”
And when she did imagine the future, she thought about what might matter in times of uncertainty. “Would we hold on to beauty and community and ways of being together?” she says. “My opinion is that that’s what we hold on to in times of crises, different ways of being together and feeling like we’re in it together.”
Though it seems far-fetched that we’ll be using jewelry as cutlery soon, Cargue’s Technospoonism brings some comfort about the future. That somehow, amidst all the challenges, humans will always need each other and come together to endure.
For more information and the schedule of activities, visit Benilde Open’s official website and social media accounts.
