Our artifact is a winnowing tray, bilao in Tagalog, from the Abra Province in the northern region of Luzon, in the Philippines. It is a woven fan-shaped basket used for drying grains of rice and sifting them, particularly performed by women.

In my Filipino culture, a bilao is a round, woven, sieve-like basket made of bamboo. It's used to winnow rice, helping to remove rice from the chaff, small pebbles or even rice hulls. As a child, my fondest memory of winnowing rice was watching the chickens gather below, hoping to feed on the leftovers.