The bulk of the works in Villamael’s current exhibition are similarly made from cut paper and situated under bell jars, but take the form of tropical flora. Their fronds and foliage are constructed meticulously from the pages of historical maps of the Philippines, preserving the territorial and colonial transitions of the nation from the 16th century to its independence in 1946. Botanists played a not insignificant role in that history, accompanying missionaries and colonial expeditions to perform surveys, creating taxonomies of species and bestowing Latin names overtop those in indigenous tongues, arguing for the importation and cultivation of nonnative species, and advising governments on the profitability and use of native plants for export as dye products, medicine, and culinary additives. By clipping, folding, and presenting these scenes as though they were botanical specimens, Villamael points to the continued effect of geopolitical campaigns and historic power struggles on the present day — offering up scenarios to contemplate how history’s afterimages remain with us.

A close look reveals the exact and considered placement of each sculptural element: maps coiled to form stems and trunks, delicately twisted fragments of paper coalescing as naturalistic leaves. The patterning and hues of antique maps lend themselves to Villamael’s task; soft ceruleans are livened with turquoise, relating the tones of the Sulu and Celebes Seas to the blue-green tissue of actual plants with startling similarity. Meanwhile, the dusty yellow and ochre hues of cartographical land are aptly transmuted into the desiccated, scorched tones of undergrowth during the dry season.

Titled Pulô after the Tagalog word for “island,” these works recall the archipelagic thinking of Antillean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, whose publication in 1990 of the Poetics of Relation provided a lens into rethinking the complexity of identity construction via cultural heterogeneity and connection. Glissant gathered his argument through a series of metaphors afforded by the geography of islands — sites of connectivity and creolization which lent themselves to an openness to transformation. He posited his concept of “relation” in contrast to other salient strategies of identity-formation that place an emphasis on roots, origin, filiation, or claims to territory. “My real subject [is] the entanglements of worldwide relation,” he once wrote, which might precisely describe Villamael’s project in this exhibition. Or elsewhere: “These trajectories [of relation] link the places of the world into a whole made up of peripheries.” Like Glissant’s circuitous and meandering inquiry into epistemology, Villamael’s exhibition leads us away from the primary tools and techniques of understanding place in order to consider the ways in which our current globalized network of nation-states and economic policies has remade notions of family, belonging, and self.