The human story is the story of an ancient–future grid. In the remains of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, we find among the earliest archaeological evidence of humanity’s attempt to edit the chaos and uncertainty of nature into the logic and predictability of the city. This marked the birth of the “urban”—both a poetic and existential separation in which humankind’s space of habitation was no longer intertwined with the natural world, but instead became curated, manufactured, manicured, and engineered.
Within these early structures, we see the first blueprints of power, economic activity, religion, and technology. The urban became the container for humanity’s collective aspirations, while also emerging as a dystopian web—one that could signal the decline of the human story.
Miguel Lorenzo Uy’s Superstructures picks up this ancient–future thread, yet situates us at the end of the line. Where the ancient city sought to house humanity, the contemporary urban is represented by three imposing, sterile aluminum-composite sculptures. These works are structured as prototypical urban monoliths while suggestively forming a triangle— a geometric shape that symbolizes stability and alchemical transformation, while evoking the sacred triads of the Trimurti and the Christian Trinity.
Uy’s vision is informed by the urban environment he inhabits. For him, commercial edifices have become reference points for constructing hypothetical superstructures, which in previous works appeared as a “spaceship” or a “monolith”—forms that allowed viewers to meditate on their existential relationship with the very urban expanse they themselves inhabit.
Superstructures is a work that not only comments on humanity’s relationship with the urban, but also problematizes the social hierarchies that shape the systems governing contemporary society. In Marxist thought, society is understood as a two-tiered construction: the “base” represents the labor relations that sustain life, while the “superstructure” encompasses the cultural, legal, and artistic layers built upon that foundation. Uy borrows—albeit subtly and suggestively—from Marx’s social critique, which interrogates the power dynamics that permeates contemporary life.
"Art is a superstructure and the artist participates in these systems of value, belief, and institutional power even as the artist attempts to critique them," shares Uy.
The choice of aluminum-composite panels—the ubiquitous skin of Metro Manila’s central business districts—is a deliberate signifier of Uy’s critique of the urban ideal. Rather than constructing static objects that merely mirror the city’s terrain, Uy disrupts this corporate sterility by transforming the material itself into a medium of transmission. Through the use of audio exciters, the aluminum panels cease to be passive, decorative cladding and instead become the vibrating source of a localized sonic environment. Uy’s recordings from Metro Manila’s central business districts are layered with the heavy, grinding textures of doom metal and ambient horror, producing a foreboding soundtrack—a sonic portrait of a civilization in decline.
Within this “site” of three structures, the urban story comes into triangulation. We move from the organized cities of the Indus Valley to the cold aluminum of the contemporary “superstructure,” accompanied by a soundtrack that signals an ending. Uy reminds us that the city is no longer merely a shelter for the human body, but a complex, vibrating apparatus—one that produces value and belief even as it reveals systemic fracture, existential disillusionment, and the uneasy persistence of the human story.
