The piano-makers involved in the 'Mang Emo + Mag-himo Grand Piano Project'. From left to right: Jaime Pastorfide, Sabas Rabino, Jr., Tranquilino Tosio, Jr., and Alwin Reamillo. Image taken from Arvin and Alwin Reamillo’s photo archive, courtesy of Arvin Reamillo.

A parlour grand piano carries the impression of being a ready-made object¹ in an exhibition space. With its parts intact and functioning, as though awaiting a player to sit and strike its keys, the instrument lifted from its musical context appears only to suggest the gesture of displacement. And yet the stories behind Filipino artist Alwin Reamillo’s Mang Emo + Mag-himo Grand Piano Project (3rd Movement: Manila-Fremantle-Singapore), 2007‒2009 speak to other forms of play.

When Reamillo returned to the Philippines from Australia, he gathered three seasoned piano-makers, Jaime Pastorfide, Sabas Rabino and Tranquilino Tosio in what had been the piano factory of Javincello & Co. The disused workshop, hot and swarming with dust and the smell of rotting wood, contained the debris of old piano parts. The rest of the building had been sublet to a garment factory, but in an abandoned area of material discards, the men would reinstall electricity, light the space, salvage structural components, and construct a piano over long months. Hardly reliant on a single ready-made object, this process thrives on bricolage² and the affects of nostalgia³ . There was, in a strict sense, no client to serve. The factory, which once catered to an elite clientele and employed close to a hundred workers, had gradually stopped its operations after the turn of the millennium.

How does the nostalgic task of reconstructing a grand piano come to encompass contemporary traces of thinking and making? Reamillo’s collaborative piece intimates the socialities of object-making, while revealing nostalgia as its motivating affect. The artist regards the project as a conceptual portrait of his father, Decimo Reamillo, the piano factory’s primary maker who passed away in 1985. To assemble an instrument in a factory that has long closed down may be an anachronistic gesture, an action out of step with time, but perhaps we may also look at nostalgia as an acute consciousness of time, an affect that propels not only a return to the past but a way of being present to time’s pressures and variations.

Nostalgia comes from the Greek words “nostos,” denoting a return home, and “algia,” which means pain or longing. The literary scholar Svetlana Boym describes nostalgia as a “sentiment of loss and displacement,” a kind of homesickness that may simultaneously be ironic, exciting a “romance with one’s own fantasy.”⁴ Boym approaches nostalgia not as an individual malaise but a “historical emotion,” a “contagious modern disease” that spreads in a time “of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.”⁵ Perhaps it is this collective sentiment that saturates the scene of artistic labour at the old piano factory. When Reamillo entertains and enacts this nostalgic inclination with others, what transpires in the gesture? In other words, what does it mean to create socialities out of longing?

The Craft and Industry of Piano-Making

Raised in Manila, Reamillo has a lively body of work that encompassed painting, assemblage, installation, video, puppetry, performance and participatory practice. His nimbleness with materials developed from years spent on the move. His residencies took him to many countries. He found roots as a migrant in Australia, deepened by an abiding art-life partnership with Australian artist Juliet Lea, with whom he collaborated under the name Reamillo & Juliet. His projects that solicited the participation of communities often integrated found and scavenged objects.

Artist Alwin Reamillo at work on the project. Image taken from Arvin and Alwin Reamillo’s photo archive, courtesy of Arvin Reamillo.

Traces of postcolonial nostalgia often run through Reamillo’s affection for objects. In a 2022 interview⁶, he would speak of his early influence, the Filipino mixed-media artist Roberto Feleo, who led him to question the Spanish colonial legacy of painting, or why it was established as the epitome of fine art practice. Drawing on the nostalgias of a Philippine precolonial past, Reamillo mused that Filipinos had been a “culture of carvers and weavers.” He cherishes actions of tactility, going on to say that the people’s visual art used to “[manifest] in tattoo, the patterns of textile, the shape of functional pottery, boat-building, jewellery-making, mat-weaving, and weaponry.”⁷ 

Object-making unravels social worlds, and perhaps nowhere was this felt most keenly in Reamillo’s life than in the piano factory, which encompassed the worlds of family, childhood and its attendant nostalgias. The artist’s father, Decimo Reamillo—fondly called Mang Emo, on whom the artwork’s title is based—was a recognised inventor. In 1961, after having worked at an older factory called Elma Piano, the elder Reamillo along with his brother Cervantes and nephew Marciano Reamillo Jacela founded Javincello & Co. What began only as a repair shop developed into a reputable family atelier that crafted upright pianos, and would eventually be the sole manufacturer of grand pianos in the country. The founders became respected makers. Jacela was the official tuner of the iconic bamboo organ in Las Piñas city. After spending time in Germany for an apprenticeship, he adopted the name of Wittemberg for the factory’s piano line. Mang Emo, the atelier’s creative pillar, was recognised for his innovations like the harpitone toning device. He crafted mechanisms to adjust the sound of the instrument as well as the feel of the keys to the pianist’s touch.

Technician Jaime Pastorfide at work on the project at the old piano factory in Parañaque City. Image taken from Arvin and Alwin Reamillo’s photo archive, courtesy of Arvin Reamillo.

The younger Reamillo grew up in this milieu of craftsmanship and industry, in warm afternoons of swirling sawdust, in the mechanical racket of labour, in the music made by hammers hitting strings. The factory facilitated the coming and going of bodies and material goods. Parts of the instrument were imported from a supplier in Japan. Many of the employees came from Philippine provinces like Leyte, Bicol and Samar, learning the craft as they built a life in urban Manila. The business reached the peak of its success in the 1980s. During that time, the Wittemberg piano would have been considered among the status symbols purchased by households with means.

As art scholar Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez writes, Reamillo’s “family-based venture ties into webbed questions of class, labour relations, [and the] globalised traffic of surplus goods.”⁸  Its growth and decline reflected larger economic changes. The decade after Mang Emo’s passing in 1985 saw many small- and medium-scale enterprises struggling with the speed of globalisation. Liberalised trade shifted dominant business models from manufacturing to dealership, wherein low-cost instruments were imported from abroad. By the year 2000, many repair shops had opened but full piano manufacturing declined entirely. Javincello & Co. closed its factory. The technicians and craftsmen who no longer had use for their skills worked in street food stalls or found a living in construction and cabinet-making.⁹ 

The word “mag-himo” means “to make,” “to create” or “to craft” in Waray, a language in Eastern Visayas, which is also the first language of Reamillo’s parents. Emphasised in the artwork’s title, craft may also point to the affective, social, and laborious actions of creation undervalued in the scheme of globalised commerce. For Boym, nostalgia may seem like “a longing for place” but is instead a “yearning for a different time–the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.”¹⁰ If longing refuses “the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress,”¹¹  then there is nuance to nostalgia, as it grants an awareness of the past—tradition, craft, childhood—being eroded by a modernising present. In the thick of these temporalities, Reamillo may be seen to re-direct a familial inventory of affects into the field of aesthetics.

Artist Communities and Bricolagic Inclinations

The act of recontextualising the piano raises questions on value as it signals the conventional divides between high art and low art, music and craft, artistry and industry. That the piano looks like a ready-made object—with only a few alterations to its outward appearance: biographic traces; wedged wooden slabs with an image of butterfly wings—invites attention not to the novelty of the finished object but the scene of its crafting.

Reamillo explains the shifts in value happening in many of his collaborative projects: “Form becomes second in priority. What’s important is we create this energy and spirit of fun, creativity, stories, sharing food, thinking, music. The project is the pull to achieve that... You relinquish a certain amount of control over aesthetics—but then again, the aesthetics now becomes the social process. That is the heart of the project.”¹² 

Among Reamillo’s primary influences was Joseph Beuys and the idea of social sculpture that Beuys developed in the 1960s.¹³  Famously declaring the line, “Everyone is an artist,” Beuys envisioned an expanded field of aesthetic practice, which may encompass thought, dialogue, events, objects, and everyday interaction—an open, malleable field that any individual may take part in forming and re-forming. The term social sculpture expresses the method and the aspiration for art, conceived broadly as energetic networks of human creativity, to facilitate the “re-shaping of the social body.”¹⁴ 

In this paradigm, the artist may be both a maker of objects and a maker of situations, playing the role of facilitator, activist, and educator. This plural, prolific agency may best be conveyed not by the trope of the sculptor but the trope of the bricoleur—which Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his theoretical analysis of bricolage, has described as one who “’speaks,” not only with things... but also through things.”¹⁵  Bricolage, like social sculpture, insists on the intimate relation between aesthetics and action, and materiality and sociality, since form emerges from collective acts of making do.

In the Philippine context, these tendencies towards social sculpture and bricolage may be historically situated in at least two art communities: the Philippine High School for the Arts (PHSA) in Laguna, and the Baguio Arts Guild in the mountain city of Northern Luzon.

Reamillo was a visual arts student at the PHSA from 1977 to 1981.¹⁶  A residential school in the sprawling grounds of Mount Makiling, it trained young talents in advanced art classes that were patterned after those offered by universities. Visual artist and scriptwriter Ian Victoriano, a classmate of Reamillo, recalls the artist’s penchant for using alternative materials—bamboo, organic objects, the bric-a-brac of daily life—as their teachers¹⁷  encouraged an “experimental and playful approach to artmaking.”¹⁸  Being with students of all creative fields opened up collaborations and a joyous wandering into different disciplines. Reamillo engaged in shadow plays, kite-flying, dance and music recitals, as well as filmmaking. “He embraced collaborative work and activities that involved a group or the whole PHSA community,” Victoriano recalls.¹⁹  In 1981, Reamillo and Victoriano would take part in Los Baños Siteworks, a seminal exhibition of site-specific projects organised by Junyee, one of the local proponents of installation art. At the nearby campus of the University of the Philippines Los Baños, they joined practitioners who made installations out of discarded and natural materials across a three-hectare open ground. Victoriano muses that these spirited, youthful years of “living in an experimental community” were formative and affecting: “I think, for [Alwin], this was the time when life and art started to become one—or art became life or life became art.”²⁰ 

Similar communal energies thrived in Baguio, the mountain city where Reamillo moved to with Juliet Lea in 1993.²¹  Here, a number of artists had formed the Baguio Arts Guild (BAG), led by founding president Santiago Bose, a mixed media artist who was also an educator and community organiser. Working across a range of visual mediums²²  , BAG members were driven by a postcolonial urge to shed off Western influences by pursuing indigenous motifs and alternative modes of display. The bricolagic inclination manifested in at least two ways: first, in material experiments leaning towards the site-specific and the ephemeral; and second, in the emergence of the artist-as-community-organiser, responding to an ecology of need.

At that time, the lack of institutional infrastructure and artistic funding in Baguio created the need for peer-to-peer support. The BAG would organise the international Baguio Art Festival in response, enabling eclectic and idiosyncratic practices bound to a sense of locality and Cordilleran culture. At its fourth iteration in 1993, Reamillo and Lea contributed a collaborative installation. “As the generation before Alwin, the Baguio artists like [Santi Bose] influenced him by opening the field and allowing a space for large-scale installation works, outdoor ephemeral works, and all forms of experimental art,” says Lea. “There was a strong sense of community which Alwin really liked.”²³ 

In these community-oriented milieus, the everyday and the local are seen as the source of aesthetics and the locus of action. We may speculate that Reamillo was drawing on these scenes of bricolagic play when he decided to reframe social sculpture as a “creative bayanihan project.”

A Re-collection of Objects, a Re-Location in Time

In Filipino, bayanihan connotes the communal spirit that propels a group to reach a common goal, traditionally evoked by the scene of villagers lifting a shelter to a new location. This is how Reamillo had envisioned the piano’s assembly. He recruited the technician Jaime Pastorfide, master carpenter Sabas Rabino and varnisher Tranquilino Tosio to achieve a shared, nostalgic task—a re-collection: in a sense, both a remembering and a gathering. In Legaspi-Ramirez’s words, it is a task of “[activating] the decommissioned,” from the rusty shell of a factory to dispossessed workers and disused parts.²⁴  From the abandoned parts of broken and unfinished pianos, the team culled a wooden backpost, a cast-iron plate, a lyre pedal, and a leg.

Arvin Reamillo, the artist’s brother, at work on the project at Galleria Duemila’s installation site. Image taken from Arvin and Alwin Reamillo’s photo archive, courtesy of Arvin Reamillo.

Such small bricolagic acts speak to conditions of incompleteness and improvisation. The restoration of materials and the instrument’s eventual completion relied on the team’s mastery as well as on serendipity. A re-collection triggers material cleverness and nostalgias. If bricolage may be seen in terms of a “relational materiality”, as cultural studies scholar Gay Hawkins describes it, we may also interpret the salvaging and recycling of discards as a way of redistributing affects.²⁵  Biographical markings on the piano—a photograph of Mang Emo, names of former workers—suggest an artefact that is already affect-laden. This nostalgia then creates openings for re-enchantment. When we approach waste as things, Hawkins remarks, “the affective energy that can accompany this, the sense of wonder or horror can be the impulse for new relations: a motivation for a different ethics, a sudden inspiration for a new use.”²⁶ 

Many of Reamillo’s other projects express the hope for ethical enchantment through a bricoleur’s tinkering with relational materiality. In West Australia, to commemorate the mass stranding and rescue of whales, he initiated a whale car project using tyres, pipes, and scrap metal collected from the industrial area, an effort that involved setting up a workshop and kitchen space for participants. Several times, he has organised helicopter projects with different communities in Australia, the first among which was launched in Fitzroy Crossing. Made in collaboration with the artist Roselyn Eaton and with materials such as beer cans, oil drums and parts of emus, the work recalls the story of the Aboriginal resistance fighter Jandamarra. Successive iterations of the helicopter project, many of them using crab shells among other materials hunted and gathered, involved other artists, children, students and migrant communities.

What did the artist desire out of these transitory gatherings? For Lea, “He wanted to inspire people to be creative as a way of life, to use art to ask questions, and find different ways of thinking and being... He wanted to encourage people to make art with the objects they find around themselves, and to do it as a collective, in order to empower the whole community.” ²⁷ 

Art historian Anna Dezeuze speculates that many process-based practices in contemporary art since the 1950s may be operating with the logic of assemblage and bricolage, if we may approach these terms as “a model of engagement with the world than as a formal category.”²⁸  Practitioners of bricolage, whether revisiting vanguardist visions or working with a more conscious social activism, share an interest in “the subversive potential of everyday life.”²⁹  Dezeuze is of course drawing on Michel de Certeau, who has written rigorously on the everyday politics of making do, and who has suggested that the “stubbornness” of everyday life is in its “recalcitrance in the face of the ineluctable speed of progress and modernisation.”³⁰  The artist-as-bricoleur works with remains—both physical and conceptual; both of a place and of a time—and subjects these to processes of “addition, expansion, and substitution.” The bricoleur, thus, expands time, layers it, fragments it and repeats it—creating time signatures that vary from modernity’s forward rhythms.

After its exhibition at Galleria Duemila and the Cultural Centre of the Philippines in 2007, the Mang Emo + Mag-himo Grand Piano Project was shown at the Fremantle Arts Centre in Australia and then at the Singapore Art Museum for the curatorial project Thrice Upon a Time: A Century of Story in the Art of the Philippines. The wings that accompany the piano emerge out of Reamillo’s iconography of mobility (helicopters, whale cars) developed throughout his own itinerant life. Echoing the bayanihan vision of moving a home to a new place, the piano’s many movements also insinuate a relocation: a temporal move, as much as a physical one. To inscribe it as contemporary art is to invoke diverse contexts of collaboration that constellate around craft. The piano factory and its craft were part of an industry that is now lost to time. And so, the artist-as-bricoleur, modernity’s nostalgic figure, collects modernisation’s ruins and finds a place for it in the contemporary, where time assumes a different rhythm: The past is not eroded by the new; they happen alongside each other, in simultaneity.

Poster for 'Mang Emo + Mag-himo Grand Piano Project'’s opening event at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, on 3 May 2007. Image taken from Arvin and Alwin Reamillo’s photo archive, courtesy of Arvin Reamillo.

In the middle of installing. After the work was launched in the Philippines, the 'Mang Emo + Mag-himo Grand Piano Project' travelled to Fremantle Arts Centre, Australia. Image taken from Arvin and Alwin Reamillo’s photo archive, courtesy of Arvin Reamillo.

A guest plays the piano during the exhibition of the 'Mang Emo + Mag-himo Grand Piano Project' at Fremantle Arts Centre, Australia. Image taken from Arvin and Alwin Reamillo’s photo archive, courtesy of Arvin Reamillo.

The author would like to thank Arvin and Rebecca Reamillo, Juliet Lea and Ian Victoriano for giving access to Alwin’s studio, archive, and memories.

Artist Bio
Alwin Reamillo (1964-2023, Manila, Philippines) studied Painting at the University of the Philippines (1981-85) and the WA School of Visual Arts, WA Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University in Western Australia (1997-99). He began his creative practice as a former student and later as visual arts teacher at the Philippine High School for the Arts. He has initiated collaborative or creative bayanihan projects that move between experimental mixed media painting, sculpture, installation, shadow puppetry, video and performance. After migrating to Australia in 1995, he pursued ideas relating to memory, mobility, cross-cultural dialogue, community collaboration, colonization, and the experience of moving back and forth between cultures. Reamillo was a recipient of the Freeman Foundation for Asian Artist Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center, USA in 1996 and the Thirteen Artists Awards, Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1994. He has participated in numerous art residencies, festivals, and biennales. Most recently, his works have been shown at the 2022 Bangkok Art Biennale and at The Spirits of Maritime Crossing, a collateral exhibition of the 2024 Venice Art Biennale.

Author Bio
Pristine L. de Leon is an independent art critic, researcher, and educator. Since receiving the Purita Kalaw-Ledesma prize for art criticism at the Ateneo Art Awards in 2016, she has written on visual art and theater as an art columnist in The Philippine Star and a contributor at ArtsEquator. In 2020, she was the recipient of the Emerging Writers Fellowship organized by Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, which published her research on public art and collaboration. While pursuing her MA in Art Studies: Art Theory and Criticism at the University of the Philippines, she has conducted workshops on writing into art and photography, and she has served as a lecturer at the Fine Arts Department of the Ateneo de Manila University. Her research interests revolve around participatory and site-specific modalities as well as historiographies of affect and migration.

Endnotes
¹ “Readymade” was a term used by Marcel Duchamp to refer to his practice of presenting art out of manufactured, mass-produced, utilitarian objects. By emphasising gestures of selection and displacement, the readymade challenged ideas of artistry associated with skill, beauty, and visual appeal. With a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool (Bicycle Wheel, 1913), a hanging snow shovel (In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1915), and most notoriously a urinal (Fountain, 1917), the Duchampian readymade called into question the handmade quality of art objects and the dexterity involved in artistic creation.
² Bricolage may refer to a process of re-using and putting together existing heterogeneous materials. Often entailing acts of gleaning and substitution, bricolage emphasises the creativity of making do. Discursively, what these activities may bring to the fore is a closer engagement with everyday life, reframing creativity as a form of everyday social practice.
³ Beyond the personal, nostalgia may be understood as a collective emotion propelled by historical shifts. Literary scholar Svetlana Boym, for instance, relates nostalgia to changes created by modernity and migrations. See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
⁴ Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. xiii.
⁵ Ibid, p. xiv.
⁶ Alwin Reamillo, “Pagtawag sang Kasanag and Bayanihan,” interview by Pristine L. de Leon, April 7, 2022.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, exhibition notes for Alwin Reamillo's Mang Emo + Mag-himo Grand Piano Project at Galleria Duemila, 5‒ 1 May 2007.
⁹ Alwin Reamillo quoted in Susan Acret, “Interview with Alwin Reamillo,” Asia Art Archive, September 1, 2008. https://aaa.org.hk/en/like-a-fever/like-a-fever/interview-with-alwin-reamillo.
¹⁰ Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. xv
¹¹ Ibid.
¹² Alwin Reamillo, “Pagtawag sang Kasanag and Bayanihan,”, interview by Pristine L. de Leon, April 7, 2022.
¹³ Art historian Cara Jordan elaborates on Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture as “a network of dialogic, pedagogic, and political aims resulting from human creativity that work in concert to produce social change.” For further reading, see Cara Jordan, “The Evolution of Social Sculpture in the United States: Joseph Beuys and the Work of Suzanne Lacy and Rick Lowe” Public Art Dialogue 3, no. 2 (2013): 144–167.
¹⁴ Joseph Beuys, quoted in In Memoriam Joseph Beuys: Obituaries, Essays, Speeches, trans. Timothy Nevill (Bonn: Inter Nationes, 1986), accessed through Erika Biddle, “Re-Animating Joseph Beuys’ ‘Social Sculpture’: Artistic Interventions and the Occupy Movement” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 1 (2013): 31.
¹⁵ Claude Levi-Strauss, quoted in Anna Dezeuze, “Assemblage, Bricolage, and the Practice of Everyday Life” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (2008): 31.
¹⁶ Reamillo eventually taught at the school from the late 1980s to the early 1990s.
¹⁷ Reamillo studied under artists such as printmaker Ileana Lee, painter Benjie Cabangis, and actor/teacher Henry Alvir, among others.
¹⁸ Ian Victoriano, e-mail correspondence with the author, November 7, 2024.
¹⁹ Ibid.
²⁰ Ibid.
²¹ Reamillo and Lea lived in Baguio from 1993 to 1995.
²² BAG members were practitioners of painting, photography, sculpture, assemblage, film, and performance art.
²³ Juliet Lea, e-mail correspondence with the author, November 20, 2024.
²⁴ Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, exhibition notes for Alwin Reamillo's Mang Emo + Mag-himo Grand Piano Project at Galleria Duemila, 5‒31 May 2007.
²⁵ Gay Hawkins critiques the overemphasis on human agency in discourses on bricolage and shifts the discussion towards affective materialities. See Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press Ltd., 2006), 87‒88.
²⁶ Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, 84.
²⁷ Juliet Lea, e-mail correspondence with the author, November 20, 2024.
²⁸ Anna Dezeuze, “Assemblage, Bricolage, and the Practice of Everyday Life,” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (2008): 31.
²⁹ Ibid., 34.
³⁰ Ibid., 37.