Reclaiming the Future from the Depths of Consumption: Leeroy New’s Balangay Spacecraft at Berlin’s Futurium

Berlin’s Futurium museum for futures thinking is currently hosting one of its most striking and critically engaged spatial interventions to date. At the heart of its landmark exhibition, Ocean Futures—which runs through August 31, 2026—stands the Balangay Spacecraft, a monumental, immersive installation by renowned Filipino artist Leeroy New.

Forged from an unlikely juxtaposition of sustainable bamboo and the detritus of global consumerism—specifically single-use plastics and discarded five-gallon water jugs—New’s installation reimagines planetary waters not merely as scenic backdrops, but as critical infrastructure, historical archives, and fragile neighbors. Part artificial island, part speculative mangrove, the Balangay Spacecraft presents a radical, community-centered vision of adaptation, survival, and kinship amid rising sea levels and an escalating climate crisis.

Main Facts: The Intersection of Art, Climate, and Heritage

The Balangay Spacecraft serves as the centerpiece of Futurium’s Ocean Futures exhibition, marking a major milestone as the institution’s premier special installation of this scale. Spanning multiple interconnected spheres, the structure invites visitors to step inside womb-like chambers designed for contemplation, transformation, and civic exchange.

The installation bridges deep-seated indigenous Filipino mythologies with the hyper-modern anxieties of global waste management:

• The Artist: Leeroy New, a Manila-based multidisciplinary artist celebrated for his speculative sci-fi structures, public art, and wearable sculptures.
• The Location: The Futurium, Berlin, Germany (exhibition open through August 31, 2026; admission is free).
• The Core Materials: Locally sourced, rapidly renewable bamboo combined with post-consumer plastic waste sourced directly from European and global recycling streams.
• The Cultural Anchor: The balangay, an ancient wooden watercraft historically used across the Philippine archipelago for maritime trade, migration, and community formation (the root word for barangay, meaning village).

Chronology: From Pre-Colonial Mythologies to Contemporary Berlin

To understand the conceptual architecture of the Balangay Spacecraft, one must trace the evolution of Leeroy New’s creative practice over the past two decades—a trajectory that has systematically shifted from insular sci-fi world-building to deeply collaborative, socially engaged public interventions.

Roots in Pre-Colonial Resistance

New’s architectural vocabulary is heavily influenced by suppressed indigenous Philippine narratives. His work frequently references Mebuyan, a pre-colonial goddess of death, fertility, and rebirth from the Bagobo tribe of Mindanao. In traditional lore, Mebuyan is described as having a body covered in breasts to nourish the spirits of deceased children.

During 300 years of Spanish colonization and subsequent decades of American rule, these nature-centric cosmologies were systematically suppressed by foreign powers. New’s cluster-like orbs and spheres—often dismissed by early European colonizers as grotesque—serve as direct homages to Mebuyan’s nurturing form. These shapes have evolved through iterations like Mebuyan’s Colony and Mebuyan’s Cradle, transitioning from static gallery objects into living, breathable, and interactive habitats.

Evolution Toward Localized Sourcing

In the early stages of his career, New relied heavily on commercially purchased items to construct alien, futuristic forms. However, as the global plastic crisis intensified—particularly acutely felt in archipelagic developing nations—his methodology underwent a profound transformation.

Realizing the immense carbon and resource footprint associated with traditional sculpture, casting, and international shipping, New made a conscious decision to stop shipping materials internationally. Today, he collaborates directly with local recycling facilities, sorting plants, and reuse centers in every host city he works in, including Berlin. By harvesting the immediate waste products of local consumption, New binds his sculptural output directly to the economic realities of the regions hosting his work.

Arrival at the Futurium (2025–2026)

The invitation to exhibit in Berlin came after Dr. Gabriele Zipf (Head of Exhibitions at Futurium) and Dr. Rosalina Babourkova (Research Associate) connected with the Mind Museum in Manila—a long-time collaborator of New’s. Following field research trips that brought Futurium curators into dialogue with fishing communities in both the Philippines and the Baltic Sea, New was commissioned to construct a European iteration of his speculative architecture. Unveiled on opening night with a live performance piece titled Dance of the Underwater Creatures—executed by Berlin-based Filipino performers wearing matching biosynthetic costumes—the Balangay Spacecraft established a permanent physical and conceptual dialogue between the Global South and the heart of Europe.

Supporting Data: The Material Reality of the Crisis

The conceptual weight of the Balangay Spacecraft is anchored in stark socioeconomic and environmental realities:

• Archipelagic Vulnerability: The Philippines comprises over 7,700 islands and possesses one of the world’s longest coastlines, making its populations exceptionally vulnerable to rising sea levels. In rural island communities like those off the coast of Tubigon, Bohol, high tides regularly submerge residential areas, forcing residents to elevate their homes on stilts.
• The Plastic Dumping Ground: As a densely populated developing nation, the Philippines has historically been inundated with multinational consumer goods packaged in single-use plastics, often unaccompanied by domestic waste-processing infrastructure. Furthermore, the country has frequently been the target of illegal, non-recyclable waste shipments from industrialized nations.
• Water Infrastructure Paradox: Despite being surrounded by the ocean and possessing abundant tropical water resources, the Philippines faces systemic challenges regarding potable tap water access, resulting in an extreme reliance on single-use PET bottles and five-gallon jugs.
• The Bamboo Advantage: In response to timber scarcity and unsustainable building practices, Southeast Asian nations—particularly Thailand, Vietnam, and Bali—have pioneered advanced bamboo architecture. New’s work champions bamboo as a rapid-growth, carbon-sequestering alternative to traditional construction materials, blending ancient indigenous knowledge with modern ecological engineering.

Official Responses and Curatorial Intent

The institutional backing of the Ocean Futures exhibition highlights a growing recognition within European museums that environmental futures cannot be imagined without acknowledging global structural inequalities.

Dr. Gabriele Zipf and Dr. Rosalina Babourkova noted that their preliminary research in Philippine coastal villages directly informed the exhibition’s comparative lens. By placing Filipino fishing communities side-by-side with counterparts along the Baltic Sea, the curation emphasizes that while geographical and cultural contexts differ vastly, both regions serve as primary receptors for the fallout of global waste extraction.

Reflecting on his motivation and the philosophy behind his work, Leeroy New stated:

"This work became a kind of personal challenge—to create active approaches to this surplus of plastic waste within a creative context. I try to give these discarded materials new, functional, and interactive forms… We know recycling plastic isn’t a true solution—we have to find alternatives. My work brings together the natural and the synthetic. I can’t ignore the plastic around me and only work with bamboo. That tension—between natural and artificial—runs through everything I make. The result is what I think of as biosynthetic structures."

Addressing the socio-cultural atmosphere embedded within his art, New added:

"Playfulness feels true to how we deal with things back home. Even in the middle of floods and other crises, people find ways to laugh. It’s part of how we process hardship—you either laugh or cry."

Implications: Rethinking Kinship, Migration, and the Global Future

The Balangay Spacecraft transcends its physical footprint as an art installation, offering profound implications for how contemporary society approaches climate adaptation, cultural memory, and artistic production.

1. Decolonizing Futurity

Mainstream science fiction and speculative design have historically been dominated by Western, industrialized perspectives—imagining futures through the technological lenses of North America, Europe, or Japan. New’s work actively decolonizes these narratives. By utilizing the balangay as a metaphor for a spacecraft, he asserts that indigenous maritime cultures possess ancient, highly adaptable technologies of survival and migration that are entirely relevant to interplanetary or post-climate-collapse futures. The colony-like domes do not signify an escape to Mars, but rather a terrestrial model for communal living on shifting, flooded grounds.

2. Shifting the Art Institution Model

Unlike traditional sculptural practices that rely on resource-heavy material acquisition, toxic casting resins, and permanent monuments, New’s methodology demonstrates a sustainable template for global institutional art. By sourcing materials locally from municipal waste streams and collaborating with grassroots innovators, New redefines the artist as a civic facilitator. The installation functions simultaneously as a physical shelter, an educational platform, and a venue for public dialogue.

3. Highlighting the Human Cost of Migration

The presence of Berlin-based Filipino performers activating the Balangay Spacecraft brings systemic socio-economic issues to the fore. As New notes, migration is deeply woven into the modern Philippine fabric; structural economic limitations—exacerbated by historical colonial impositions—mean that even in a resource-rich nation, citizens are frequently compelled to seek livelihoods abroad. The installation provides a communal vessel for these diaspora narratives, transforming the museum into a space of shared kinship, emotional grounding, and collective resilience.

Visitor Information

• Exhibition: Ocean Futures (featuring Balangay Spacecraft by Leeroy New)
• Location: Futurium, Alexanderufer 2, 10117 Berlin, Germany
• Dates: On view through August 31, 2026
• Opening Hours:
  • Friday to Monday: 10:00 – 18:00
  • Thursday: 10:00 – 20:00
  • Tuesday & Wednesday: Closed
• Admission: Free