The most recent iteration of The Collection of Jane Ryan and William Saunders is a collaborative work between Pio Abad and the jewellery designer Frances Wadsworth Jones that consists of replicas of the jewellery collection seized by US Customs from the Marcoses at Honolulu Airport when they sought exile in 1986. The jewellery have since remained unseen by the public, stuck in legal and political limbo. In 2013, Abad was able to procure images of the jewellery and from these digital images, complex 3D renderings of each piece were created and 3D printed in translucent white resin. First exhibited as part of the Honolulu Biennial in 2019, the exhibition returns the jewellery to the site of their initial discovery. They reappear in Honolulu, not as not as luxurious accessories but as spectral reconstructions with a different history to tell. Alongside the 3D printed reconstruction of these jewellery is a text that describes their value in terms of specific items of national development that it could have funded. Among them: A 19th century Belle Epoque diamond tiara in platinum with a Cartier central diamond that can fund the treatment of 12,052 cases of tuberculosis until their full recovery and an antique intense pink Taviz cut Golconda diamond worth the the combined construction of Bicol International Airport and the renovation of Sanga-Sanga Airport in Tawi-Tawi.

By ensuring that the details of this collection are continuously presented in the highest resolution possible, The Collection of Jane Ryan and William Saunders offers the possibility of sustaining creative political action, and with that the possibility that this vexed history can attain some kind of resolution.Through these acts of reconstruction, Abad and Wadsworth Jones depict the unresolved narrative of the Philippines under the Marcoses not as an isolated history, but as a nexus of intertwined histories, implicating a wide-ranging cast of transnational and transhistorical characters; narrating a story of corruption and impunity that is at once geopolitical and allegorical, speaking of both painful intimate histories and imminent collective futures.

The oscillation between the personal and political stems from the role Abad’s parents played as anti-Marcos activists under the conjugal dictatorship and their continued struggle to implement democratic change in the Philippines. It is apt that this iteration of the project is not just a collaboration between creatives but also one between family, Abad and Wadsworth Jones having been married since 2009.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/27733