Arts & Culture

Bringing Detalia Aurora’s Iconic Furniture into the Future

With more substantial roles in the family business, Paula and Vikki Rodriguez are bringing Detalia Aurora into the future by nurturing their design processes, fostering their close-knit community, and bringing passion into everything they do.

by Shari Quimbo
photography by Ezekiel Sullano

This story is taken from our archives. Originally published in Zee Digital Vol. 2 2018.

Detalia Aurora is certainly no stranger to our pages, or to the homes of Cebu’s most discerning residents. For years, the company has been in the furniture export industry, producing pieces that have become iconic in their own right—the Shellf bookcase shaped like a nautilus; the Tera wall art, which is a map made of corks; and the eye-catching Gaia chair.

The brand’s staying power is truly a testament to the talent and skill of the team behind its creations, but perhaps some credit also goes to sisters Paula and Vikki Rodriguez, who, since becoming more involved in the family business, have worked on streamlining processes and nurturing their edge in product design.

“We needed our company to not just evolve, but to adapt to the changing market,” Vikki explains. “It wasn’t enough for us to create new products anymore. We needed to think about more than just aesthetics. We needed to change as a whole, which involved ingenuity from design, construction, cost and market strategy. It’s a slow but steady process.”

The process began, according to Paula, with finding a way to adapt to the industry’s changing demands and expectations. “We decided to work within the company,” she says, explaining that they started working
closely with buyers to collaborate on specific collections. ìWe made sure that they will always come to us to develop new ideas and create products together.”

Then they started looking inward, with the goal of creating a close-knit working family within Detalia Aurora. “From the beginning, Vikki and I wanted a co-working atmosphere in all aspects of the company. Detalia’s biggest asset is not just design anymore—there is no more disconnect,” Paula continues. “Our company’s asset is its people, and the products we create. Creating that level of teamwork, they reiterate, is what gives them more time to work on developments with buyers.

“Material and design innovation will always set us apart from the rest of the international design market.”
-Vikki Rodriguez

Among the challenges they both had to face was surviving the global recession a few years back, which was said to have had a considerable effect on the local furniture industry. To Paula, though, it was more of a challenge than a setback.

“Here’s my two cents—I believe that those who are still here in the furniture industry are those who have found smart ways to keep the business going—may it be in product or in company structure,” she shares. “Those companies we keep in contact with are those who have found their niche in their respective markets.”

The furniture industry in 2018 is a whole new landscape, and it’s something both women are excited about moving forward. “I think the Cebuano design industry has changed in a way that there are no more boundaries,” Vikki says. “Creatives, entrepreneurs and other individuals from different industries are open and excited to collaborate with each other—it doesn’t matter what field you’re in.”

Despite the changes, both also believe that what makes Cebuano furniture different from the rest of the products on the global market remains the same. “Material and design innovation will always set us apart from the rest of the international design market,” Vikki shares. “More importantly, I think the pride we have for our work also speaks for itself.”

This is also why they hope that more young design students become interested in the local production process. “I really do feel that there is a comeback and a growing interest in design for the furniture industry,” Paula shares, adding that they’ve seen a sizable increase in local internship applications as opposed to the international ones they had gotten a few years ago. “I believe the design students in Cebu are becoming more aware of the capabilities of Cebu furniture manufacturers. With easy access to information online, like websites or social media, I feel that they are able to see Cebu’s skills in handcrafted design, and appreciate the products coming out of the industry.”

“I hope this continues so more young designers are better able to work with indigenous material and promote local craftsmanship to help keep the design industry and Cebu’s handicraft industry going,” she continues.

It’s clear that both Paula and Vikki have settled into their roles at Detalia Aurora. And although they have both been involved in business operations, their passion lies in creating.

Having once been design students themselves, Paula and Vikki have settled into—and are relatively thriving at—their roles at Detalia Aurora. At the core of their efforts, though, remains the passion for the business their family has created, and for the art of production.

“I’ve always been interested in the industry, although when I was younger, it was not particularly about design,” Paula shares. ìI was intrigued by the development, innovation, craftsmanship and materials that Cebuano furniture manufacturers were developing on a global scale. I knew I wanted to take part in it.”

“I wanted to be part of the process,” Vikki agrees. “I saw it as a challenge to create, and creating something
goes beyond design. It’s imagining the possibilities but understanding the physical limits.” She adds, “I saw how proud my parents were of this business and I saw how hard they worked for it. I saw how everyone in the company worked hard for it, and I still see that today. I am grateful to be in that community, and to contribute as best as I can.”

Related Topics:Detalia Aurora Paula Rodriguez Vikki Rodriguez

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Pasulong; Anton Quisumbing at the Yuchengco Museum

by Mia Durano | photography by Zach Aldave

There is something about walking into the Yuchengco Museum that sends a signal before you’ve even seen the artworks. Situated in RCBC Plaza, right in the middle of Makati’s financial district, it is an institution with a point of view — a forum as much as a gallery. So when the energy of an exhibition opening spills past the main hall and into the corridors, something tells you that someone has earned their way in.

Pasulong is Anton Quisumbing’s first solo exhibition in over two decades. Twenty-nine sculptures that took two years to complete, all cast in bronze, made from propellers salvaged from boats damaged by Typhoon Odette in 2021. Those who knew what that ill-fated period was like understand why the timeline matters. This is not decorative bronze; rather, it is marine-grade, built to resist corrosion and force. It is a material that does not yield to the ravages of the ocean.

There is a reason why metalwork is described in physical terms — it is cold, harsh, brash, forceful, and resistant. And when you walk into a room full of bronze sculptures, that experience becomes resonant. Propulsion, with its loops, arcs, and curves that rise, descend, and turn back into shape, embodies this. There are no right angles and no hard stops here. In this particular piece, the artist is remarkably aware of its sinuous movement and instead finds its voice within the medium.

This is the tension Anton Quisumbing works with. His practice has always tested what a single material can hold, allowing every movement to maintain the weight of its volume. Pasulong does not present a clean arc of recovery; instead, it delivers the full range of its intentions.

Sight, a warped figure with an almond eye and armor along one side, carries what the exhibition describes as a sense of lightness despite the weight we carry in our lives. The work stands with the authority of something that has found its own gravitas. The artist leans toward the idea that recovery is not resolved in one sweeping gesture.

Anton Quisumbing spent years away from sculpture, turning instead to painting as his primary medium. In Pasulong, he returns to bronze and to the physical demands of the material, which, in a way, becomes an act of pushing further toward his original vision. The outcome is an artist in full control of both subject and medium.

Anton Quisumbing ‘s practice as a sculptor is anchored in testing the strength of a single material.

The artist’s primary concern in working with bronze was its malleability.

Pasulong marks Anton Quisumbing’s return to sculpture.

Propulsion, bronze sculpture 83×44×35cm 2024

Sight, bronze sculpture 63×40×22.8cm 2024

Gilo Sarmiento, this writer Mia Durano and artist Ramon Orlina

Arts & Culture

Kundiman–A Collaboration Between Charles Lahti and Francis Dravigny at the Qube Gallery

by Oj Hofer

“Collaboration is like carbonation for fresh ideas “-Anonymous

Kundiman—drawn from the Filipino tradition of lyrical love songs marked by longing, devotion, and emotional depth—unfolded not merely as an exhibition but as a dialogue between two artists whose practices, though formally distinct, share a common goal: that creation is never singular, never complete, and never entirely one’s own. The word itself carries weight. In the Philippine cultural imagination, kundiman is not passive sentiment but a mode of endurance—a way of loving what one cannot fully possess, of honoring what exceeds one’s grasp—and to name an exhibition after it is to make a claim about the nature of making itself: that art, like the song, is an act of devotion directed toward something larger than the maker’s intention. It is a form that does not declare but lingers; not spectacle, but the quieter and more demanding thing called intimacy.

The collaboration between Charles Lahti and Francis Dravigny operates at what might be called the threshold of language—the place where gesture becomes structure and structure, over time, turns into meaning. Their working relationship is less a merger of two styles than a negotiation between two modes of listening: one drawn to the decisive mark, the other to the patient accumulation of woven form. Lahti’s mark-making is grounded, deliberate, and unambiguous in its commitment to presence; his lines carry the quality of breath, each stroke an event rather than a flourish. Observers familiar with East Asian ink traditions will recognize this sensibility immediately, for in Zen ink practice and Japanese calligraphy, the practitioner does not decide what to draw so much as prepare the conditions under which something may reveal itself—the mark that emerges from this discipline is not decorative but testimonial, evidence of a moment of full attention. Lahti’s work operates within this logic even when the cultural references are Western, and what anchors it is not style but stance: an ethical relation to the act of making that distinguishes genuine presence from the mere performance of spontaneity, a distinction far rarer in contemporary visual art than it ought to be.

“The line is not drawn but revealed—through stillness, breath, and a quality of awareness that the discipline of reduction alone makes possible.”

Dravigny’s woven interventions introduce a different, though deeply complementary, temporality. Where Lahti works in the decisive instant, Dravigny works in accumulation—the slow building-up of material over time—and his use of abacá, a fiber indigenous to the Philippine archipelago, is not incidental. Abacá carries its own history: long harvested by hand, traded across colonial networks, woven into ropes and sails, and more recently reclaimed as a medium of cultural expression, so that to bring it into an art context is to activate this history without necessarily declaring it. In Dravigny’s hands, textile transcends its usual function as background or support and becomes instead an act of preservation—a material archive that holds within its weave the gestures of another artist. This concept, which the exhibition implicitly explores, speaks to something the atelier tradition has long understood: that a work of art may pass through multiple bodies and multiple intentions and still emerge with coherence, provided each maker brings to the passage not assertion but responsiveness, the capacity to receive another’s action and carry it forward without erasing it. Dravigny’s woven interventions propose a similar ethic, made visible rather than concealed.

What Kundiman ultimately stages is not the product of collaboration but its conditions: the particular quality of attention required when one artist’s gesture enters the field of another’s practice, and the willingness to wait that such attention demands. The Japanese aesthetic tradition names this interval ma—the generative pause, the charged space in which meaning gathers before it resolves into form—and the exhibition’s restraint is precisely its argument. There is no excess, no spectacle, no rhetorical gesture toward significance, only a sustained attentiveness to process that runs counter to the dominant logic of contemporary exhibition-making, in which legibility is prized and impact must be immediate. Kundiman refuses this, trusting the viewer to do the work of attending, and in this refusal it finds its deepest kinship with Zen aesthetics: the discipline of reduction, the clarity of intention, the respect for what is essential over what is merely present.

“What Kundiman proposes is more radical than most exhibitions dare: that the self, in the act of making, becomes temporarily permeable—open to the gesture, the material logic, the devotion of another.”

The concept of interbeing—rooted in Buddhist philosophy and carrying the understanding that nothing arises independently, that every form is the result of conditions and every maker is in part made by what they make—finds in this exhibition its material proof. What was created here does not belong to one hand alone. It emerges in the space between, where gesture is received, transformed, and returned; where material listens and form responds and meaning unfolds not as conclusion but as continuation. The exhibition ends. The dialogue does not. This is the space between hands: where making becomes meeting, and where interbeing quietly, insistently gives rise to form.

Charles Lahti with his latest works—layering print with bandana textiles to create tactile, hybrid surfaces where image, pattern, and material converge.

Francis Dravigny in his Cebu studio—transforming abacá and found materials into layered, sculptural weavings.

A wall of interbeing—where weave, gesture, and form dissolve into quiet harmony and non-duality.

A flat surface transformed into a quiet weave—drawing the eye inward, where structure softens into stillness and resonates with Zen practice.

Arts & Culture

Kundiman After Dark: Traditional 19th Century Filipino Musical Genre Continues to Inspire

by Kingsley Medalla

The Kundiman is a traditional 19th-century Tagalog musical genre that served as a profound source of inspiration for many sophisticated, classically trained artists. The name is derived from the Tagalog phrase “kung hindi man,” literally translating to “if it were not so.” These musical pieces were often performed as poignant love songs characterized by smooth, flowing melodies containing emotional depth. Originating as a serenade in poetic Tagalog lyrics, it features a minor-to-major key progression expressing longing, devotion, patriotism, and a yearning for freedom.

Sine Pop, a boutique theater in a 1948 post-war heritage house located in Cubao, Quezon City, serves as a charming venue for cultural events and intimate performances with a small ensemble. Recently hosting Kundiman After Dark, a recital honoring the legacy of Nicanor Abelardo (1893–1934), a highly esteemed Filipino composer and pianist hailed as the “father of the sonata form in the Philippines” and a master of the art of the Kundiman. Carlson Chan, founder of Sine Pop, clarifies their unique model: the performances are open to the public and are, as such, complimentary, as its primary focus is to promote the performing artists per se.

The performances featured beloved Kundiman classics including Mutya ng Pasig (1926), Naku… Kenkoy (1930), and a personal favorite, Bituing Marikit (1926). These musical pieces were brought to life through the solo acts and live vocals of tenor Erwin Lumauag, Japanese violinist Shiho Takashima (who has since made the Philippines her permanent residence), and the renowned composer, pedagogue, and pianist Augusto Espino.

“Nasaan Ka Irog,” written in 1923, drew inspiration from a romantic tale shared by Nicanor Abelardo’s friend, who went overseas leaving behind his beloved in the Philippines. Years after, this man eventually became a doctor and, upon his return, discovered that the love of his life had been married to someone else. He also learned that the letters he had sent were never delivered to her, as they were kept by the doctor’s family, secretly away from her. A classic case of unrequited love. Kundiman serves as the heart and soul and the pinnacle of Filipino musical artistry.