Lawa-Lawa: Sa Buhol ng Hindi Tiyak
[Webbings of the Uncertain]
(In Progress, 2025)
Event Title: Kalahok sa Nagbabagong Kalikasan
UP Diliman Arts and Culture Festival 2025
Exhibition Date: April 22–June 2025
Location: University of the Philippines
Organizer: UP Office for Initiatives in Culture and the Arts (OICA)
Exhibiting Artists: Dayang Yraola, Karl Castro, Isola Tong
Introduction
Over the last five years, since I began my transition just before the pandemic, there have been increasing reports of violence and killings of trans* women. These do not include unreported incidents, nor the many slower forms of violence—such as social marginalization—that signals the high rates of financial insecurity, isolation, and declining health among members of the trans* community. While these are happening, wildfires induced by climate change have broken out in patches between the pine forests of Baguio and the surrounding towns in Benguet. Is it too far-fetched to connect the environment and the sociopolitical? Or perhaps, upon closer inspection, a thread can be drawn?
When I began transitioning in 2019, I was working as a lecturer at the De La Salle–College of Saint Benilde, School of Design and Arts. Operating within a department that was predominantly heteronormative in a Catholic institution, I clearly remember the nervousness I felt the first time I appeared on campus as a trans* woman. That initial fear gradually ebbed as I became more comfortable with my body and chosen gender identity. Much of this ease came from the fact that the institution had a policy of inclusivity—one that extended beyond the student body and included the faculty as well.
Educational institutions are, in many ways, contentious spaces—historically rooted in neocolonial projects and reactionary pedagogy. However, thanks to the efforts of progressive students and scholars, universities have also transformed into safe refuges and spaces of hope for trans* academics. In view of these intersecting vectors of history, identity, nature, and social struggle, how might trans* place-making challenge colonial architecture and state-determined order embedded in the institutional landscape? How does this strategy of complicating sites of intensity translate into form?
As an artistic strategy through which to think through these investigations, I invoke a neologism I formulated—Bayotic Refugia. Borrowed from biology, “refugia” refers to areas where populations or species can survive and persist during periods of environmental change, acting as “safe havens” for biodiversity. By coupling the word biota with the Bisaya word for femme queers, bayot, I contextualized and queered the concept to mean safe havens for gender-nonconforming life.
In A Capital City at the Margins, Michael D. Pante notes, “Although UP began as a bastion of colonial tutelage, it eventually developed an activist tradition.” My conception of this liminal refuge acknowledges the specters of the institution’s colonial past while generating counter-historical knowledge production within and through the institution. The bayotic refuge becomes a link that intersects transness, ecosystems, and resistance through the formulation of this novel cultural metaphor.
Historical Context
The University of the Philippines Diliman was envisioned not merely as an educational space but as a geopolitical project of American imperialism. Its planning adopted the "University Town" concept which was part of the City Beautiful Movement, an American urban design ideology that formed in the 1890s. It fused neocolonial architecture with symmetrically planned landscapes that follows Western European aesthetic ideals. The tree-lined oval, the mixture of neoclassical and art deco buildings, and carefully zoned land use mirrored the values of U.S. modernity: efficiency, civility, individualism, and control.
This vision was carried out by architects such as William E. Parsons and later Harry Frost, in collaboration with Juan Arellano and Louis Croft, making the university an extension of colonial aesthetics embedded within an imported framework of “civilizing” nature and space. It is rooted in the policy of "benevolent assimilation" to perhaps euphemize the contradictions inherent in being an imperial democratic power.
This built environment was not neutral. The relocation of UP from Manila to Diliman in the late 1930s was driven by President Manuel Quezon’s desire to insulate students from the radicalizing potential of the social malaise in Manila. Official statements emphasized “wholesome supervision” and a “serene academic environment,” revealing how the new campus functioned as a spatial apparatus for control. As Michael D. Pante recounts, Quezon viewed the transfer as necessary to remove students from direct engagement with the social struggles of the city. The pastoral imagery of UP Diliman thus masks its function as a disciplinary enclosure, constructed to moderate behavior, insulate privilege, and secure intellectual conformity.
Beneath this tranquil exterior lies a layered history of militarization, displacement, and ecological reordering. UP Diliman was built over cogon-covered plateaus and thick forests, transforming a once biodiverse space into a landscaped grid of lawns, walkways, and administrative symmetry. Nature was managed rather than cultivated; made ornamental to suit institutional ethos. The result is a campus that carries with it the residues of ecofascist design: a landscape where colonial legacies persist not only in monuments and buildings, but in the spatial logic that orders who belongs, what is remembered, and what is made invisible. It is against this backdrop that PUGAD negotiates with this contentious history.
Transecological Counter-Mapping
In this context, PUGAD positions itself as a refusal of ecofascist and colonial cisheteropatriarchal inheritance. By working with ruderal plants—those that grow in disturbed environments like Tibatib and the Dilim fern—the project embraces a different kind of ecology: one that thrives in the cracks of control. These plant-kin allies are metaphors for trans and queer bodies that resist categorization and flourish outside normative systems. PUGAD reclaims space not by imposing a new order, but by cultivating refuge in what has been othered. It challenges the myth of pristine nature and instead honors the entangled, fugitive, and adaptive lives that persist in the margins of institutional memory.
PUGAD introduces transecology as both method and metaphor—a strategy for reimagining ecological and spatial relations through the lens of transness. Where institutional landscapes like UP Diliman have historically imposed taxonomies of order, hierarchy, and purity, transecology works through ambiguity, permeability, and transition. It attends to bodies and biota that do not “belong” to official narratives: the queer-trans*, the non-normative, the invasive, the regenerative. Drawing from Bettina Stoetzer’s concept of ruderal ecologies that emphasized human-plant socialities, this project entangles trans* life with plant-kin that survive in fractured environments.
The proposed installation—a floating nest made of abaca rope and Tibatib vines —materializes this ethic of entanglement. Suspended between trees along the Tau Alpha Legacy Boardwalk, the structure resists monumentality and permanence. Instead, it offers shade and softness, creating a transitive architecture that honors bodies in flux. The use of site-specific natural materials becomes a form of ecological remembering, invoking disciplined landscapes that once thrived before developmental expansions. PUGAD becomes a living archive—a bayotic refugia—where memory, identity, and environment converge without settling into fixed form.
Positioned against the rigid geometries and patriarchal symbolism of the surrounding campus, PUGAD transes the very notion of place-making. Rather than inscribing prescribed identity onto space, it invites counter-memory, alternative reimagining and translations. In this way, transecology becomes an act of counter-mapping: an embodied, ecological critique of colonial spatial logics, and a gesture toward future worlds sustained by unruliness, relation, and growth beyond the logics of the grid.
The Forest as Text, The Text as Forest
The spatial intervention of PUGAD will be located along the Tau Alpha Legacy Boardwalk, a site heavy with architectural, institutional, and gendered symbolism. Built by a fraternity and framed by rigid geometries and neocolonial design, the Boardwalk serves as a microcosm of UP’s broader aesthetic of order, androcentrism and monumentality. By tying a suspended and pliant structure between trees, PUGAD offers a material and conceptual counterpoint—an architectural glitch to a landscape historically scripted by patriarchal and colonial imagination. It subverts the archive by refusing permanence, legibility, and domination, and instead proposes a way of remembering that is fugitive, embodied, and alive.
Constructed from plant materials with local ecological histories—PUGAD foregrounds a dialogue between past and present ecologies. Tibatib, an epiphytic vine, anchors the installation to its current biological context, while Dilim (lamon in Bicol), once abundant before the urbanization of Quezon City, gestures to an erased vegetal memory. These materials function not only as sculptural elements, but as kin and collaborators—ruderal companions that bring a more permeable and transecological kind of spatial knowledge. The structure hovers mid-air, tethered not to concrete foundations but to trees, held together by a logic of biotic interdependence rather than dominance.
As a “text,” the site becomes legible not through signage or plaque, but through presence, movement, and shared temporality. Viewers are invited to pause, rest, reflect, or simply pass through. The installation does not demand to be monumental—it asks to be dwelled with. In doing so, PUGAD invites the community to reencounter the campus not as a finished institution, but as an ongoing, contested terrain shaped by bodies in transition, transitional temporalities, and environmental memory.
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