Zamboanga Encounters: Where Land and Sea Meet
Zamboanga Encounters: Where Land and Sea Meet (National Museum of the Philippines, Zamboanga, 2025–2026) explores the city’s layered history as a maritime and cultural crossroads. Co-curated with historian Felice Noelle Rodriguez, the exhibition gathers more than thirty maps of Zamboanga and Southeast Asia, alongside ethnographic drawings, photographs, and urban plans. Together, these materials chart encounters across time: from pre-colonial networks and the Sulu Sultanate to Spanish conquest, American occupation, and the making of the modern port city.
Situated within Fort Pilar—a 17th-century stronghold turned museum—the exhibition reflects on the fort itself as a spatial archive of shifting sovereignties. The curatorial approach emphasizes Zamboanga as a site where land and sea, empire and locality, continually converge. By juxtaposing cartography with visual and material culture, the exhibition re-frames maps not only as instruments of power but also as vessels of memory, trade, and encounter.
As co-curator and researcher, I worked closely with archival collections and local collaborators to foreground Zamboanga’s role in wider regional histories. The project highlights how visual artifacts can reveal the entangled geographies of Southeast Asia, while also opening space for local publics to see their histories reflected within broader currents of colonial and postcolonial transformation.
