HAVEN LUYA
■ CYCLE 1 fellow
In Tadhana: New Rituals for Reconciliation, (tr)ancestral resilience technologies and mixed-body mythweaving inform an altar activation and poetic performance that (trans)vestigates contending body-memories of my intractability, shame, and non-belonging and offers Catholicism’s re-transfiguration into earth-based practices as a framework toward regenerative repair across lineages of domination, trauma, and separation. In Tadhana, the snake as monster-aswang-devil is reclaimed as a symbol of ancestral protection and sacred steward of the cycles of life-death-rebirth - permission to move from the rigidity of narratives indoctrinated and inherited; to (re)shape our body into a myth that con(tends) our complexity.
With reverence to ancestral animism and folk magic across Filipinx and Celtic traditions, intergenerational stories that blur binaries of oppressed::oppressor, and faith in transformative justice as a prayer-portal to build beloved community, Tadhana (Tagalog for “fate”) asks:
How do we trick Catholicism into re-indigenization? A reverse-colonization, sans domination?
How might we lure Jesus - the symbol of purity and martyrdom suspended in holy ascension - back to the soil of earth not to enact Judgement but to (re)turn our sins to humus - decomposed organic matter?
How can we, activists, we, #decolonizingabolitionists, confront the truth that cultures of fear, puritism, and shame, are entangled within us too?
What is a ritual container that mutually worships our messiness? Can this container build our capacity to hold complexity amidst polycrises?
In Tadhana, haven moves serpent-spined through these questions in an (un)holy trinity of practices: spoken invocation, communal altarwork, and movement. Invocation is in reverence to orasyon - chanting practice maintained in Filipino folk magic and by mangihilot (traditional and Indigenous healers) that awakens spiritual power in ritual. In the communal altarwork activation, haven re-myths the Catholic sacrament of Reconciliation, also known as “Confession” which asks penitents to reflect on their sins and share them privately to a priest (acting in god’s stead) for forgiveness to avoid punishment in the afterlife. In this rendition, however, the confession is mutually worshiped by overlaying voices and honored by the tying of clooties - the Celtic practice of tying rags to trees at sacred sites. The final act is an integration between the intimate and the communal, where haven’s movement with rope stop-starts-rewinds time and re-animates the erotic voice once denied them and their ancestors.
The central story of Tadhana takes place around a six-foot tall live-edge pine installation pyrographically imbued with snake symbols inspired by batok (traditional Filipino Tattoo) and Celtic artwork from ancient stone engravings and The Book of Kells. In the center of the piece is a cross-shaped hole - a remnant of colonial Christianization from haven’s Celtic and Filipino ancestry and their Catholic upbringing. The wood piece is rough with peeling bark and spattered with distress marks - denoting the edge of the wound; the imperfection of healing. The batok patterns - chila na urog and iniufu-ufug - are the forked tongues and scales of snakes respectively, and evoke the whispers and interlocked bodies of the anito (ancestors) that emerge to support us in re-membering after the trauma of separation. Other symbols such as the feminine figure from the snake-witch-stone, the Treskilion, celtic knots, the kappi krab, and sun-moon, storytell into the spine of the piece until it is alive; receiving and transmuting the unburied secrets laid before them.
Tadhana recognizes that the death of empire is not just happening at a systemic scale, it is happening in the intimate, untouched stories of our bodies and relationships. We in our diaspora, we in our cycles of harm, we in our severance from place-based cultural practices and rooted villages have forgotten how to reconcile and heal from the heaps of shame and non-belonging passed down to us. Now is the time to offer our bodies as sites of intervention. Awaken unspoken desires. Gather your intractability. Together we descend into the liberated world.
HAVEN LUYA
■ an interview with the artist:
haven luya (they/them/love) is devoted to creating containers that mutually worship the tensioned and intimate stories woven in our soma-scapes. with reverence to archipelagic animist and herbalist technologies of their tagalog and celtic lineages, they practice ritual tattoo in(k)vocation, poetic movement performance, and pyrographically-activated altarwork to re-myth (tr)ancestral resilience technologies and re-member embodied belonging. haven’s work emerges, descends, and cycles from the roots of trans eros, mixed-body mythweaving (a theoretic lens that invites complexity through mixed-race experience), ancestral inquiry, and transformative justice, to coalesce interactive installations that interrogate how we might disrupt and heal from patterns of domination perpetuated in our intimate and intergenerational relationships. A recipient of Viet Voice’s inaugural AAPI Artist Fellowship, haven recently birthed and performed their work “Tadhana: New Rituals for Reconciliation” as part of the The Land We Carry exhibition. Within the last few solar cycles they performed “Trans Plant Poetics” for the La Jolla Playhouse Queer Variety Show, engaged in land-mythography and resistance crafting with Babay L. Angeles’ “Olongapo Disco: Creature Myth Across the Diaspora,” and had literary and digital artwork published in Combos Press Queer Earth Food 3 and Querencia Press, Not Ghosts But Spirits Vol II. Born and residing most of their life on the unceded lands of the Kumeyaay people (so-called San Diego), you can now find this genderfluid transsexual creature emerging rhizomatically across turtle island.
HAVEN LUYA
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HAVEN LUYA *
I am dedicated to creating containers that mutually worship the tangled and untouched stories woven in our soma-scapes. My mythopoetic tattoo practice, Mula Sa Binhi, utilizes ethnoautobiographical mythweaving, meditative states, altar building, and herbal poetics to coalesce the receiver's creation story. Here, we contemporarily queer and reclaim the legacy of Indigenous and (tr)ancestral marking practices maintained despite colonial consumption and imperial erasure, returning the body to earth and place-based belonging.
I am committed to cultivating a praxis of mixed-body mythweaving. I seek to critically engage both whiteness and filipinoness in my work to reject “all-or-nothing” approaches to self-concept and build prayer for holding complexity in divisive times. When I am not in(k)voking living canvases, I create through pyrography, such as a recent wood-burned altarpiece that weaves traditional Visayan and Tagalog batok (tattoo) and Celtic art motifs as a portal to connect to my ancestors across lineages.
In my poetic performances, I utilize spoken invocation::oracion and ritual movement to invite audiences beyond gaze and into the intimate possibility of trans eros ~ where pleasure and intrigue is overlaid with stories of perpetuated domination and separation. In my “Trans Poetics Performance” ancestral burdock root became a subject of phalloplasty and weeds a metaphor for trans resistance to oppression.
I desire audiences to experience tension and release beyond the confines of what binds them; to offer the complexity of my stories as a scaffolding to become enchanted by their own.