母親之藤盾 Kalasag ng Ina (Mother Shield) is a rattan shield woven during a typhoon in Dulan, Taiwan, a place whose climate, vegetation, and atmosphere evoked the oceanic landscapes of the Philippines. The humidity, banyan trees, plumeria, hibiscus, and scent of the sea produced an uncanny sense of familiarity, prompting me to consider how communities living across the Austronesian region have been shaped by shared ecological phenomena. In encounters with Amis, Bunun, Paiwan, and Tao communities, I became attentive to words that resonated with Philippine languages—ina (mother), mata (eyes), bato (stone), and bagyo (typhoon)—and began to think through language, landscape, and craft as traces of ancestral and ecological connection.

The shield draws from the rattan armor traditions of Pongso no Tao (Orchid Island), which is associated with protecting the living from the spirits of the dead. In Tao/Yami cosmology, these spirits are called anito, a term that also refers to ancestral and environmental spirits in precolonial Philippine cultures. During a shell ginger weaving workshop on Orchid Island, my teacher pointed to old banyan trees and spoke of spirits inhabiting them; this recalled accounts of my babaylan ancestors communicating with anito residing in trees. Woven during a storm, the shield developed a spiraling form that emerged intuitively through the force of wind and rain, resembling the movement of a typhoon. Craft thus becomes a form of embodied memory: a way of listening to the land, registering climatic events, and reconnecting with ancestral forms of knowledge. It also invokes the historically significant roles of transgender Austronesians as shamans and craftspeople, positioning weaving as a practice through which trans ancestral memory might be felt and remembered.

Projected onto the shield is Ina, Mata, Bato, Bagyo, an experimental video composed of looping images of an Austronesian archaeological site in Dulan, satellite imagery of typhoons that have struck Taiwan and the Philippines, and images of my own left eye. One of the archaeological landscapes is overlaid with my performance as an anito, collapsing bodily, geological, and ancestral time. The cyclical movement of the video echoes the accumulation of time within the woven structure, where each gesture leaves a material trace. Together, the shield and video consider how natural disasters do not simply destroy, but also produce cultures, lifeways, forms of resilience, and ways of remembering. Kalasag ng Ina is an inquiry on how recurring encounters with typhoons, fire, geological change, and other disruptions shape who we are, and what kinds of futures these cultures of disaster might make possible.