Bugarin + Castle’s Stanley Picker Fellowship will develop a body of 3D work exploring the failure of monumentality and beautification under the Filipino dictatorship. Through the Manila Film Center, they will examine what Gerard Lico calls the Marcos regime’s “edifice complex”, and how state architecture was used to project cultural power and glamour, and how those images became unstable through catastrophe, haunting and performance.
Conceived as an 1980s monument to authoritarian modernity, and as the site for a new international film festival, the Manila cinema became marked by rushed construction, the deaths of construction workers in quick-drying cement, and stories of their ghosts haunting the cinema, before falling into abandonment and later being appropriated as the venue for the Amazing Show, described as the “largest transvestite show in Asia”. This movement, from dictatorship monument to haunted ruin to trans performance venue, makes the site a charged lens through which to examine how architecture cannot stabilises one goal. Instead, constructions accumulate incompatible intentions and narratives.
Biography
Bugarin + Castle (Davide Bugarin and Angel Cohn Castle) bring architectural research into collision with the unruly immediacy of cabaret. Recent projects investigate shaming parades, cross-dressing as punishment, and cries of Filipino aswang shapeshifters to explore the spatial politics of sound, thresholds and public spectacles. Their research-led works ricochet through archival histories and contemporary queer and trans experience: from medieval public mocking and colonial-era noise laws in Manila North Cemetery to voice feminisation and sound permeating through walls. Their collaboration first developed through drag and live art as ‘Hairy Teddy Bear’ and ‘Pollyfilla’, and the urgency of cabaret continues to inform their gallery practice, aiming to trouble and disturb easy narratives.
Bugarin + Castle are currently representing Scotland at the Venice Biennale 2026, with a solo exhibition curated by Mount Stuart Trust. The creative team also included Forma and Pollyanna, and funders included Scotland + Venice, Heritage Fund and Henry Moore Foundation. Their work has been exhibited at UK institutions including Tate Modern, ICA: Institute of Contemporary Art, Fruitmarket Gallery, and City Art Centre, alongside international exhibitions at WHYNoT Space (Philippines), Powerhouse Arts (USA), Tromsø Centre for Contemporary Art (Norway), Microscope Gallery (USA) and Krittinen Gallery (Finland). Davide Bugarin studied MA Architecture at Royal College of Art, and his work has been featured at the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2025 and Malta Art Biennale (2024), with la Rivoluzione delle Seppie. He has also participated in a residency at Venice Biennale of Architecture 2023, selected by the Biennale curator Lesley Lokko. Bugarin completed a research fellowship at The Warburg Institute, University of London and was part of the New Architecture Writers programme. Bugarin received awards and scholarships from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the Worshipful Company of Architects and Burberry. Angel Cohn Castle studied BA Intermedia Art at Edinburgh College of Art and her work has been commissioned by BBC Scotland, LUX Scotland and Talbot Rice Gallery, and exhibited at galleries including Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany) and BALTIC (UK). As founder of Pollyanna, she has produced exhibitions at Royal Scottish Academy, Stirling Castle and international galleries. She is currently Lecturer in Fine Art at Newcastle University, and was previously Teaching Fellow in Fine Art at The University of Edinburgh.
