This work has not been peer reviewed by the University of the Philippines Rainbow Research Hub or its project members. The views expressed are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Hub or its project members.
2026 Philippine Queer Studies Conference
POSTER PRESENTATION
Tying the space yet to come
Isola Tong
This presentation focuses on my creative activation project LAWALAWA: Sa Buhol ng Hindi Tiyak (Webbings of the Uncertain) which rethinks place-making through a queer, transecological, and decolonial practice within academic and urban environments.
LAWALAWA, a suspended installation built from abaca rope near UP Diliman’s Tau Alpha Boardwalk, functions as a bayotic refugia, a neologism combining biota (life within a particular area) with bayot. Borrowed from biology, refugia refers to ecological safe havens where species survive in times of severe environmental shifts. Queering the term transforms it into a cultural metaphor for trans* and gender-nonconforming life persisting under social, political and ecological crisis. Positioned against the rigid geometries of colonial architecture, PUGAD foregrounds ecological entanglements, drawing from indigenous plants that thrive in disturbed environments.
This project extended this inquiry through a web-like installation that wove organic materials into a shelter of connection and possibilities. It serves as an ephemeral monument of entanglement, tying together ecological issues, trans* embodiment, and the colonial history of the university. Rather than aspiring for monumentality, LAWALAWA emphasized pliancy, softness, and fugitive modes of inhabiting or occupying. It reactivated trees as collaborators in place-making and as kin that hold ancestral, ecological, and spiritual importance.
BRUHA PARTY: Ecodragahan sa Kagubatan, staged at the installation site in June 2025, convened queer and trans performers and DJs to test how bodies, sounds, and rituals could reclaim academic spaces historically designed to discipline and “civilize” according to U.S. colonial heteronormative logics. Dancing under a canopy of trees mirrored precolonial practices of sacred gathering at balete groves, invoking new rituals of solidarity and resistance. The gathering destabilized the divide between nature and culture reclaiming sites of enclosure as porous spaces of radical kinship.
This creative attempt introduced transecology as a critical framework that favors ambiguity, permeability and transitions. Through activating trans* and queer bodies alongside plant-life in the landscape, these interventions imagine ecological and social futures that thrive in cracks of control: imagining the possibilities of how academic institutions might be re-enchanted, how ancestral ecological practices can inform contemporary resistance, and how queer and trans* rituals can generate alternative ways of living, remembering, and relating.
The project propose a transdisciplinary vision of uncanny flourishing in which the linked strategies of trans* survival and ecological flexibility is germane. Situating critical queer and trans spatial imagination in dialogue with ecological agencies and colonial histories, they offer an expanded gamut to the conversations across the fields of queer studies, decolonial ecology and socially engaged art.