Bruha ng Disyerto (Desert Witch): Landscapes of Fire examines fire as both a destructive and generative force, linking the fire-scarred landscapes of California and the Philippines through intersecting histories of colonial forestry, indigenous land stewardship, and environmental precarity. The project engages with the concept of the pyrocene, an epoch shaped by industrial fire, to explore the ways in which fire transforms ecologies, bodies, and cultural memory. Through material interventions and site-responsive research, the work foregrounds fire not as mere catastrophe, but as a language of political struggle, transformation, and flux.

The project integrates natural materials such as rattan, abaca, charred Joshua tree bark, fallen Benguet pine needles, and woven grasses etched with images of fire-scarred terrains. Archival photographs, government records, and netizen documentation are layered onto these surfaces, reflecting historical and contemporary approaches to fire suppression and land management. In addition to these material assemblages, the project incorporates participatory elements, inviting viewers to imprint botanical stamps onto the body using natural ink derived from scorched wood. This embodied engagement evokes the spectral presence of histories tied to displacement, movements, and the cyclical nature of destruction and renewal.

At the intersections of the constellation of the research is the figure of the desert witch, a metaphorical and material presence that haunts the entanglement of fire, colonial legacies, and ecological memory. This spectral figure embodies the estrangement of people and (agri)cultural practices from land due to the imposition of colonial forestry regimes under Spanish and American rule. Through a convergence of traditional basketry, digital fabrication, and organic material, the project unsettles linear notions of time and technology. In reconsidering fire as an agent of both ruin and regeneration, Bruha ng Disyerto opens space for critical conversations on the politics of fire, indigenous knowledge, and climate.