Statement

As a research-based transdisciplinary artist and theorist, my practice inhabits the intersections of ecology, transness, and postcolonial geographies. Rooted in sculpture, installation, performance, and social engagement, my work re-enchants landscapes not merely as physical terrain, but as an agent of contested archives shaped by colonial histories, ecological relations, and gendered erasures.

In projects such as Bruha ng Disyerto: Landscapes of Fire, I explore fire as a regenerative and destructive force, unearthing how colonial forestry in the Philippines and the U.S. has estranged people from the land, producing languages of othering. Across these contexts, I attend to the ways in which both nature and trans* bodies are historically disciplined, erased, and reclaimed.

In my methodology, I incorporate basketry as a tactile and embodied form of storytelling. I gather local and organic materials not only for their ecological significance but for their mnemonic capacities. Through weaving, I recover and interpret erased lineages, allowing ancestral and vegetal memory to re-root within contemporary forms.

My current project, Lawa-Lawa: Sa Buhol ng Hindi Tiyak (Webbings of the Uncertain), which will be installed in a forest along UP Diliman’s Tau Alpha Fraternity Boardwalk, embodies what I term "bayotic refugia," a neologism combining “bayot” (a Bisayan word for queer/femme) and “biota” (the life of a region). 

Inspired by biological and architectural concepts of rehabilitative spaces, the project proposes trans* poiesis as an embodied mode of placemaking that thrives in interstitial, fugitive, and transitory spaces. The work challenges institutionalized monuments and hardened concepts, proposing instead a living archive, both material and metaphorical.

My praxis insists on the persistence of marginal life, human and nonhuman, and the capacity of memory, matter, and collectivity to unfold new futures. This gesture of material and conceptual entanglements seeks to create thresholds of becoming and embodied elsewheres.