Jett Ilagan Reveals the Sound of the Metro

Multi-disciplinary artist Jett Ilagan reveals the sound of the metro in his latest exhibition ‘Animated_Landscape’ at the National Commission for Culture and the Arts Gallery.

Images courtesy of Kiko Nunez and Jett Illagan
June 19, 2023

What do you hear when you walk through the streets of Manila? Do you notice the sounds that surround you, or do you tune them out? How do these sounds shape your experience of the city and its culture?

These are some of the questions that Jett Ilagan, music producer and multimedia artist, explores in his solo exhibit, Animated_Landscape. Through graphical notations—visual representation of sound, Ilagan invites viewers to listen to the sonic forms of Manila and discover its profound influence on our navigation of the everyday.

In Animated_Landscape, sound is made visible, sonic narratives turn physical, and what is unnoticed becomes obvious. Utilising laser cut technique and ceramics, Ilagan lays out a practical picture of Manila. The exhibit showcases rock imprints, metal sheets, and hardened clay, each representing different aspects of the city’s urban landscape: from traffic and public transportation to the markets and road. A tapestry of the country’s cultural hub.

“We live in a rhythmic environment,” said Ilagan. “Let us open our eyes to the complexities of listening itself and the possibilities it may offer to recalibrate our own relationship with our home, the city.”

Towards the sonic journey’s conclusion, the viewer is asked to turn inwards and reflect on their own relationship with the urban soundscape and the systems built around it: what are the sounds we make and how do these sounds make us?

On Animated_Landscape, Ilagan situates his experience of a complex system of chaos in Manila, the city where he lives — cars, combustion, weather, politics and people. By seeing sound as graphical notations, sound became an abstraction, a visual representation of sound. In this transformation of sound to visual, Ilagan created a visual field journal, a rigorous account of what it means to live in a city like Manila. In Ilagan’s means to create this exhibition is a soft proposition — on how we can imagine to compose a better world for us, that we may realize that the ecological notations should be rearranged and performed accordingly in order to survive and live a life that resembles a utopia.