Visual artist, architect, and musician Micaela Benedicto tunes out the noise to craft an artistic language that defies categorization
Micaela Benedicto’s one-woman exhibition “A History of Hollows” at Tarzeer Pictures transformed the artist’s personal memories embedded in objects from her grandmother’s house into an architectural space of photograms, sound, and kinetic sculpture—one that is quiet yet charged with poetry.
Unfolding like a subtle protest against the noise of contemporary life, her work turned silence into a powerful space that both shelters and unsettles.
The gallery was dimly lit. Its atmosphere thick with the presence of things long gone, like specters of her grandmother’s home. Both dreamlike and tangible, as if phantom memories had materialized into physical form, Benedicto’s photograms captured fragments of a space that “once was.”
Deeper into the room, a carousel of mirrors spun slowly. Its motion is like a gentle, endless merry-go-round, reflecting light in sharp bursts, like falling stars scattering across the quiet, dim-lit white cube. A song played, eerie yet tender. Its repetitive melody fills the space, looping like a soundtrack to eternity.
For the visual artist, architect, and musician, silence isn’t some empty, pitch-black void. It’s a space charged with possibility—one that forces us to notice what we so often overlook. Through sound, sculpture, and spatial tension, she bends silence into an intimate language that speaks far beyond words.
With Benedicto’s architectural work “Concrete House by the Ocean” recently named as one of the top 12 houses of 2024 by Wallpaper* Magazine, Benedicto has firmly established herself as one of the Philippines’ most accomplished architects. The same year, she also presented her sculptural series “Mirror Figures” at the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale.
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But for Benedicto, it is the blending of artistic languages from visual arts, architecture, and music that truly defines her artistic vision and aesthetic sensibility.
“When I was feeling a little lost in my early 20s, feeling frustrated and uncertain with my architecture job, I sort of went back to when I was 11 and revisited what I liked to do as a kid—making music… Making art to me isn’t necessarily drawing and painting, which I also loved as a child, but it’s more an umbrella for everything that I like to do. I think music, architecture, visual arts fall under art-making,” says Benedicto.
Here, Benedicto reflects on her journey from her unique childhood to her work wearing many artistic hats to transform the personal into the poetic, tuning out the noise to craft an artistic language that defies categorization.
Wallpaper* Magazine listed your architectural project “Concrete House by the Ocean” as one of the top 12 houses of 2024 alongside houses by architectural icons such as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. What does this distinction mean to you and your architectural practice?
This was unexpected. The company in that year-end list was surreal, I could hardly believe it. It was a tough project to pull off. I tried to make something that didn’t have a lot of finishes and flourishes, something that would age well, and that really took in its environment. So much time and effort go into the process of designing and building something, and I tend to be quite obsessive about getting things right and ensuring the idea comes through.
What was it like growing up as Micaela Benedicto? What aspects of your childhood inspired you to become the artist, architect, and musician that you are today?
I was a self-taught piano player and a math nerd. I saw some parallels between math and the piano—it’s a spatial instrument to me. I was super introverted and hardly played with other kids. I was a dreamy child, though, and I liked making things up. I was a big bookworm and liked writing. A lot of the things I do now are for slowly realizing an internal world that I had a hard time articulating growing up.
My parents both liked to sing, so music was a big backdrop of our childhood. My dad worked in TV and sometimes took us to sets. There was an element of fantasy there. He and my mom took us to clubs, too—well, more like hotel lounges where he sometimes made shows, and I guess it’s a bit strange to be a child sitting around in the midst of a nightlife.
My mom stopped working at her job to have kids and was a full-time mom. My earliest memories are filled with her teaching me things like reading, writing, listening to songs. When she realized I could play melodies on the piano, she taught me how to play with my left hand. She had great style, too. The house we grew up in was different from the neighbors’ and vaguely futuristic, and it was mostly because of her choices. She was quite oblivious to what everyone else was wearing and doing. I don’t think this was intentional but think she might have raised us all to become unique individuals.
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In your Tarzeer Pictures solo show “A History of Hollows,” you presented a series of photograms that revealed your relationship with a deeply personal architectural space—your grandmother’s home. What have you learned about yourself as an artist and human being while working on that exhibition?
I felt quite lost in the years leading up to that, and was questioning a lot of things about my work in relation to the world around me. I was seeing a lot of works that were about “big issues,” and for a time the personal didn’t seem to matter. And the more it seemed not to, the more compelled I felt to go there. I learned that I had to follow my instincts and that I needed to diffuse a lot of noise around me in order for something silent to be heard. I needed to trust the ways in which I perceived the world. I was glad to present something that felt true.
The preparation for that show—looking through my grandmother’s old house, my family’s archive and objects, and the process of documenting them—placed me in a strange space that predated my existence. Thinking about my mom and grandmother as women living in different times had such a profound effect on me. There were all these processes I used as metaphors for how our memory works, and for once I took it to a place that was very specific: my mother’s memories and story, and mine, and my retelling of these.
I realized that a lot of that show was also about growing into adulthood and standing on the shoulders of the women who made us. To explore something so personal and ambiguous using languages that I know like geometry, precision, and the photographic process seemed nearly impossible but in the end made complete sense. I was trying to draw parallels between space and loss, while defining grief as a kind of space engulfed by structures and by time.
How does your womanhood influence your processes of ideation, production, and curation in your work?
I’m beginning to think there’s something really different in the way I think that’s different from, let’s say, my brothers. The organization is different. To them, the way I arrange my bookshelf, or what and where I choose to write in my notebooks, follows absolutely no logic. I don’t know if that’s a male and female difference. One thing I noticed is that what I think of as rational is different. And that my process seems to be all over the place but I think it just means it’s not linear and not necessarily in the order of steps to follow. I tend to go back and forth a lot, and sideways, if that makes any sense.
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How does the cross-disciplinary nature of your art practice influence your visual language, modes of production, and aesthetic sensibility?
For a long time, I kept everything separate but lately, I feel that the things I do are bleeding into one another. I believe my work in each of those disciplines—architecture, visual arts, and music—holds a particular ethic that ties them all together.
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I’m quite proud of the final installation in the Tarzeer show, as for the first time, I felt like I entered another specter—that of cinematic space. And yet it felt so true to everything else that I had done before it. This is something I’m going to explore further. Everything that I do, architecture, sculpture, music, was in that one piece.
What inspires you the most as a creative?
It is inspiring to me to see work and try to do work that dissolves genres, trying to make work that has multiple meanings, so that in time it can transform and always has something new about it to discover.
Architect and sculptor Maya Lin once said, “A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don’t see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time.” If you were to leave us with a quotable quote about your body of work as an artist and architect, what would it be?
I learned that my fascination with spaces goes beyond physical space. I want to go into those other spaces that are perhaps incalculable and harder to define, that maybe just exist in our minds.
Name some of the women artists whose studio practices influenced yours.
At the moment, the writer Anne Carson. I came across her story “1=1” from 2016. It was a brilliant piece, not just in its unique form, and the surprising sentence structures and composition, but in the very heart and ethic that lies in it. I don’t know how exactly, but to me, it’s also so telling that a woman wrote this. It was a story about sensitivity.
I also admire a lot of female artists from the Neo-Concrete Movement. I’ve been reading more about Lygia Pape’s work in particular, from its geometric abstract beginnings to its more feminist leanings.
What makes you happy?
Writing, whether song or story. Making music. Finishing a work. Seeing or reading something incredible. Traveling, seeing new places. Hanging out with people I like. Mentoring young people. Seeing people do great things. Unexpected generosity. I guess it’s not much different from everyone else.
Why are you an artist?
I think everyone who is an artist is on a quest to put into a certain language, whether visual, auditory, or in words, the things that are not so easily understood in the world.
