Inspired by the engkanto, or environmental spirit in Tagalog, the performance engages with spectropoetics, a mode of attending to histories and traces that linger beyond the visible. Rooted in the spectrality of place, the performance draws inspiration from Juan Crespí’s 18th-century journal, in which he recorded the discovery of a bird decoy sculpture along the banks of what is now called the Pájaro River: thus giving the river its name. This historical moment reveals the complex entanglements of colonial documentation, indigenous craft, and accounts of historical ecology. 

The invocation of this object in colonial accounts considers how material and ecological traces of the past continue to haunt the present, which continues to shape bodies and landscapes. The performance operates as a gesture of listening: to the land, to the river, and to the intensities embedded in these geographies, amplifying their echoes through movement and material engagements.

As a Filipino artist in a settler colony like the United States, engaging with the traces of the Ohlone people is fraught with contradictions. The performance acknowledges the difficulty of reckoning with indigenous histories as a person whose own ancestors endured Spanish colonization: the same empire that charted and renamed California. This complex positionality complicates the act of remembrance, as I navigate the tensions between solidarity, displacement, and entanglement. This gesture hopes to unsettle colonial frameworks that have sought to render these histories invisible. 

This act of remembrance extends into material practice, as shown in the headdress woven from native tule grass, a plant found along rivers and estuaries in California. Tule, traditionally used by indigenous peoples for shelter, basketry, and ritual objects, functions here as a material vessel for connection: a way to highlight the ecology of the place while reckoning its layered histories of habitation and dispossession. Through its animistic provocations, the performance embraces the porous boundaries between the living and the dead, the seen and the unseen. 

The artist’s transformation into the spirit of the forest suggests the transness of nature itself; its capacity for shapeshifting, survival, and adaptation. Through speculative embodiment, Engkanto asks how we might relate to land not as mere territory for exploitation but as a knowing and storied listener.