ESC Biennale 2025: T4mb4y L4ng

December 2025 Escolta, Manila

Nightingales Screening as part of the ESC Biennale

The ESC Biennale is a bi-annual initiative organized by 98B COLLABoratory in Escolta, Manila. Since its inception, the project has served as a platform for collaboration, experimentation, and conversation within and beyond the local art community. Through its programming, the Biennale has continually created space for contemporary artistic practices that are critical, inclusive, and context-sensitive.

The 2025 edition, titled Tambay Lang (stylized as T4MB4Y L4NG), turns its attention to being together in ways that feel open and loose. It reflects on tambay as time spent in between: after an event, before the next task, while waiting or doing nothing in particular. In pocket spaces – sitting a bangkô or monobloc chairs, at the kanto, or around food – communal exchanges take shape, and moments of convergence happen without planning.

As Dr. Dayang Yraola writes, tambay is marked by “unpurposeness”; its very purpose is not to have a purpose. And yet, it is meaningful: "people are doing things not because they have to, but because they want to be there."

By anchoring this Biennale in Tambay, we embrace a challenging contradiction: framing a large, organized event around something inherently unstructured and open-ended. But this tension is part of our grounding—as an artist-run space shaped by hanging out, figuring things out as we go, and making space for what emerges along the way.