🌾 Entwined Spheres 🌾
Since my residency at Emerging Islands a few years ago, I’ve been developing a framework for social engagement with bearers of traditional ecological knowledge—one grounded in mutual respect, listening, and long-term thinking. These ideas were further tested and reshaped during a collaborative workshop at Puon Institute last year, where critique, dialogue, and dreaming exposed both the possibilities and limits of such frameworks.
Out of this process came Entwined Spheres, a closed-door weaving encounter held recently at Project Space Pilipinas with Lucban pandan weavers Arceli Venzuela, Felisin Hari, and Paulita Abejar. This workshop centered collective creativity as both method and ethic—bringing together different ways of knowing through equal exchange, fair compensation, and a commitment to honoring the agency of weavers as cultural and ecological knowledge holders.
Together, we co-created experimental woven objects integrating locally gathered plastic discards with traditional materials like pandan and buri leaf. Through shared labor and conversation, we didn’t just make—we unlearned, questioned, and reflected. I learned more about the working conditions of the weavers and came to a deeper realization: you can’t build a “perfect” framework from theory alone. It has to be lived, felt, and negotiated through actual practice—talaga.
Entwined Spheres gestures across diaspora and homeland, tracing the structural inequities embedded in something as ordinary as plastic. Through the collective act of weaving, we asked: how are ancestral practices transformed by the materials we’re now forced to work with? How can traditional craft still hold space for resistance, renewal, and reimagination in the face of extractive systems?
These are ongoing questions—ones we don’t answer alone. I’m grateful for the shared space, time, and creativity of the Lucban weavers and for the tough, beautiful work of making meaning together. As a social practice, this framework will continue to evolve, shifting with every encounter. Entwined Spheres was not the final chapter but one of the first steps in building the trust and relationships needed for genuine co-creation.
Since my residency at Emerging Islands a few years ago, I’ve been developing a framework for social engagement with bearers of traditional ecological knowledge—one grounded in mutual respect, listening, and long-term thinking. These ideas were further tested and reshaped during a collaborative workshop at Puon Institute last year, where critique, dialogue, and dreaming exposed both the possibilities and limits of such frameworks.
Out of this process came Entwined Spheres, a closed-door weaving encounter held recently at Project Space Pilipinas with Lucban pandan weavers Arceli Venzuela, Felisin Hari, and Paulita Abejar. This workshop centered collective creativity as both method and ethic—bringing together different ways of knowing through equal exchange, fair compensation, and a commitment to honoring the agency of weavers as cultural and ecological knowledge holders.
Together, we co-created experimental woven objects integrating locally gathered plastic discards with traditional materials like pandan and buri leaf. Through shared labor and conversation, we didn’t just make—we unlearned, questioned, and reflected. I learned more about the working conditions of the weavers and came to a deeper realization: you can’t build a “perfect” framework from theory alone. It has to be lived, felt, and negotiated through actual practice—talaga.
Entwined Spheres gestures across diaspora and homeland, tracing the structural inequities embedded in something as ordinary as plastic. Through the collective act of weaving, we asked: how are ancestral practices transformed by the materials we’re now forced to work with? How can traditional craft still hold space for resistance, renewal, and reimagination in the face of extractive systems?
These are ongoing questions—ones we don’t answer alone. I’m grateful for the shared space, time, and creativity of the Lucban weavers and for the tough, beautiful work of making meaning together. As a social practice, this framework will continue to evolve, shifting with every encounter. Entwined Spheres was not the final chapter but one of the first steps in building the trust and relationships needed for genuine co-creation.
