Ronald Ventura Mounts a Collateral Show at the 61st Venice Art Biennale

“Ganyan si Ronald dati, karga-karga kapatid niya pag baha noon sa Tonsuya (That was Ronald before, carrying his brother on his back during floods in Tonsuya),” he said.

You could sense nostalgia welling up in the man’s eyes.

Moments later, he pointed to the artist’s drawing of the San Simeone Piccolo Church across from the Venezia Santa Lucia train station beside the Grand Canal.

“Ah, ‘yan naman ang San Bartolome Church sa mismong bayan ng Malabon (Oh, that’s the San Bartolome Church right in the heart of Malabon).”

There was something uncanny in the exchange. Faced with images of Venice, the artist’s father kept seeing Malabon. Within that drawing, he recognized not Venice but home itself. Under the same moon, surrounded by singing waters, territories blurred and memories overlapped.

It is precisely this collapse of distance that lies at the heart of Ronald Ventura’s “LUNA,” an official Collateral Event of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

Running from May 9 through Nov. 22 at Docks Cantieri Cucchini, Castello 1/A, the exhibition, curated by Ruel Caasi, explores the deep-seated connections between two water-bound locales through more than a dozen newly realized works that blur the miles between two tidal worlds, capturing the slow sedimentation of history and memory.

The first time I heard the concept for the exhibition was a year ago at Ventura’s Makati studio with longtime curator Ruel Caasi. The pair talked about the large-scale drawings and sculptures of human boats, crabs and a paddle-armed sentinel that Ronald would create for a proposed show in Venice, and there were already studies.

I had a glimpse of postcard mashups between the two tidal cities, similar in a way but also blatantly different, as well as notes for a triptych in graphite of debris either washed ashore or found in the aftermath of a flood.

I was puzzled as to why no one had thought of it before. The parallels between the two places were staring us right in the face: Venice, artfully structured between stanzas of sky and water, and Ventura’s hometown, with the hum of industry and the resilience of stone along the estuaries of Manila Bay.

The journey from that initial meeting to the opening reception of “Ronald Ventura: LUNA” felt, at times, like a lifetime.

Mounting an official Collateral Event within La Biennale di Venezia is a tough task, like wading through rising floodwater in precarious stilettos. Getting chosen is one thing. Living up to the Biennale’s strict guidelines is another.

It is easy for exhibitions in Venice to slap themselves with the “collateral” label, but to be officially designated is a distinction bestowed yearly upon not many. For Filipino artists, that rarity has only a few clear touchpoints, among them Fernando Zobel’s inclusion in the Biennale’s official collateral program in 2017. David Medalla, of course, is in his own category.

“Look up and you’ll find human figures, a man and a woman, reimagined into the crescent curves of boats,” Caasi pointed out.

Suspended from the ceiling, these anthropomorphic vessels hang in floating suspense. They are a visual metaphor for bodies wholly adapted to the rhythms of the sea.

Ventura views the moon as a kind of emotional satellite. The curator explained, “Just as distant lovers might seek comfort in looking at the exact same glowing sphere, the moon bounces signals between these two coastal cities.”

For Ventura, while looking at one city, he is reminded of its counterpart halfway around the world.

In Malabon, known historically as the “Venice of the Philippines,” along with neighboring Navotas, water is considered a condition and not something relegated to the background. Water is its literal lifeblood, sustaining generations through a vibrant fishing industry and extensive aquaculture that form the backbone of the community’s livelihood.

Decades of reclamation, rapid urbanization and land subsidence have intensified flooding, worsened further by typhoons and rising seas.

“The same with Venice: its beauty is inseparable from water but also from vulnerability,” Caasi said.

The phenomenon of acqua alta, or high water, has become part of Venetian life, seasonal flooding that at first was manageable but over time grew more severe due to subsidence, industrial activity and climate change.

In Ventura’s vision, Venice and Malabon converge not just as geographical parallels but as metaphors for a world increasingly defined by rising tides.

“Climate undoubtedly is not an abstraction for both cities,” Caasi said.

Their histories, layered with memory, myth and survival, invite reflection on what it means to live with water in all its contradictions.

And rather than delivering a loud, sweeping manifesto, Caasi noted that the exhibition aligns with the Biennale’s theme, “In Minor Keys,” curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, with Ventura using the moon and the boat-bodies to show how people live with water day after day: its beauty, its danger and the constant need to adapt.

The featured works hum with the uneasy, emotional resonance of a minor chord, capturing the daily, persistent reality of living alongside a force that is simultaneously a giver of life, an agent of ruin and a mirror of our collective future.

Yet for Ventura, the dialogue between Venice and Malabon is not merely conceptual. It is personal.

Four o’clock in the morning, if you could call that morning, in Malabon during those heady times in the ‘90s was different: the food stalls had just opened and were serving a few of us straggly zombies who either woke up early or hadn’t slept at all.

At this devilish hour, a young Ronald Ventura, having painted all evening into the small hours, would wake up his brothers and me. I was not young long; I met the soul early. We would go eat at nearby Connie’s.

Ronald’s head would still be buzzing with ideas about art, painting and impaling the essential down on canvas. Over our favorite sopas, or thick elbow macaroni soup, we’d talk about Botong, Basquiat, Bacon and the idea of how to effectively conjure from tubes of lowly paint bought from a store all these narratives, ideas and emotions.

We would also talk about how to participate in an age-old existentialist, conversational thread: Why do we make art? Or why make art at all?

It was a question that hung in the breeze of a Malabon morning, past the brackish esteros and the fishponds of this part of Metro Manila where you would feel most isolated due to typhoons, high tides and impassable roads, but, at the same time, feel instilled with the pride of being part of a community of fisherfolk, traders, craftsmen, artists and musicians, all those who make a living with their hands.

We would talk until it was time to go to school or get to the office, the very mundane things hindering us from becoming who we were.

Fast forward to early May of this year, and this same lonely satellite hovered over us in the floating Italian city of Venice as one of the Philippines’ leading contemporary artists had just opened his exhibition at the docks toward the tip of Via Garibaldi.

The same moon, a lifetime in between.