A Day in the Life: Nice Buenaventura

Textiles, glitches, and vernacular Filipino culture

A Day in the Life is a series by A&M where we invite artists to share a day in their life through images accompanied by brief descriptions.

Nice Buenaventura.

Nice Buenaventura is a Manila-based artist whose practice moves between drawing, painting, installation, and citizen-ethnography, probing the tensions between ethics and aesthetics in postcolonial Filipino life. In 2025, Nice presented her solo exhibition Technomagickck and other blunders at Artinformal Gallery in Makati. The exhibition featured binakol textiles made in collaboration with Abrenio weavers, their traditional kusikus—whirlwind in Ilocano—patterns deliberately disrupted and combined with the artist’s print-error motifs.

In this edition of A Day in the Life, Nice shares a glimpse into her studio practice, her errands, and the ongoing fieldwork behind Tropikalye, her online index of vernacular culture and everyday aesthetics in the Philippines.

Nice Buenaventura, Technomagickck and other blunders, 2025, binakol textiles with disrupted kusikus patterns, acrylic on canvas. Partial installation view, Artinformal, Manila. Image courtesy of the artist.

Last year a group of Abreño weavers, led by Maricel de Martin-Domondon, were interested in trying their hands at modifying the kusikus (Ilocano for whirlwind) pattern with me. My last solo exhibition at Artinformal in October 2025 featured their binakol textiles with disrupted patterns, which is a masterful feat of overriding muscle memory. I am grateful for the collaboration. 

For me, working directly with weavers is far more meaningful than buying textiles in brokered markets, where handmade goods are forced to compete with machine-made counterparts. Under these conditions, I see the wind-based patterns of the binakol as a visual cue, especially when glitched and entangled with my print-error motifs, for how existing systems might be taken apart and reconfigured. 

Nice Buenaventura, High Tide Atlas, 2026, distilled water, shallow trays. Installation view, A World of Islands: On Palms, Storms & Coconuts, Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City. Image courtesy of the artist. 

This is my most recent work to date: a translation of print-error motifs, or Xerox islands, as I like to call them sometimes, translated into a durational installation titled High Tide Atlas (2026). It is made of distilled water held by shallow trays. The work is developed for A World of Islands (2026), a travelling exhibition currently at Ateneo Art Gallery, curated by Ligaya Salazar, who writes that  the exhibition “brings together artistic perspectives and research on the Philippine archipelago, her climate, her people and their movement over seas and oceans.”

Nice Buenaventura's studio in Manila. Image courtesy of the artist.

You are catching me in  a rare lull. December through February can be the busiest months for an artist in these parts. My Christmas holiday is just about to begin. 

This is the studio with some stretched blankets for when I get back. I have been finding myself drawn to woven textiles, first because of their underlying grid, or their mathematics. They feel like a complete system: finite in structure, but capable of endless variation.

Spotting our beloved mint green on an errand. Field documentation for Tropikalye in Manila. Image courtesy of the artist.

Between taking a break and caring for my children, there are errands. I like running errands when they double as field work for an ongoing project called Tropikalye. It is an online community index that documents the accidental intersections of aesthetics and the everyday in the Philippines. Mint green is some kind of a national colour.

Working moodboard. Image courtesy of the artist.

This is a moodboard of sorts for an upcoming exhibition that involves taking stock of my body of work.

Follow Nice on Instagram at @nice_buenaventura and visit her website to see more of her works.