In his work as a city planner and landscape architect, Paulo Alcazaren has spent the past 15 years traveling all over the country and taking the opportunity to record the heritage of plazas, their landscapes, and their remaining structures of note. This documentation forms the backbone of The M’s latest exhibition in collaboration with the Filipino Heritage Festival Inc., with support from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts called Places of Memory, Places of the Heart: Plazas in the Philippines.

Plazas in the Philippines have been central to communal celebrations and other social and political events in over 1,600 towns and cities for hundreds of years. However, it has fallen prey to the pressures of population and economic growth, as well as the attendant consequences of urban densification and commercial real-estate development.

The exhibition narrates our contemporary understanding of Urban Heritage in the Philippines harking to this year’s National Heritage Month theme—Heritage: Change and Continuity. Set in an installation that represents the modern-day equivalent of the plaza for many Filipino urban dwellers – the basketball court – the exhibition will showcase a selection of 16 plazas from around the country, featured to show their contexts alongside archival images, interactive artworks, photo collages of Rizal Monuments that form part of the built environment of plazas, and a selection of artworks from The M’s own collection, highlighting the history and trajectory of town and city plazas in the Philippines.

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