Luna Beller-Tadiar

Luna Beller-Tadiar is a Manila-born, NYC-raised, queer, mixed-Filipinx multi-media artist who works in choreography, video, text, and comics. Her practice takes (postcolonial) mimicry as method for transformation and knowledge; her work across media excavates a body language made up of fragments—remnants of lands, communities, and machines. Luna draws on a movement education that includes Argentine tango, Aikido, capoeira, and contemporary dance; she also draws on her ongoing PhD work in dance and media studies.

For the Puón institute, she will present her current work-in-progress, a performance solo with the working title “Mercury,” in which a mercurial body mimics, re-members, puns, and glitches its way between bodily states, disaggregating a subject, and re-spinning worlds from their traces.

Lyra Garcellano

Lyra Garcellano is a visual artist who likes to look at history (even if it's painful). She does comics, paintings, installations and writing.

In 2023, she took part in the first Puon Institute workshop where she presented her ideas on collectivizing: “How to Cook a Collective” and “How to Perform the Death of the Collective.” As a returning participant, Lyra will introduce a board/card game that she has been developing regarding scenarios in the art ecology.

Terms considered in the game include (but are not limited to): Mutual aid, Collective pot, Network (collaborations, portals), Access, Currency, Conditions, Occupy

Carol Anne McChrystal

Carol Anne Almocera McChrystal is an independent artist and cultural worker. Inspired by her own family migration story, her materially-driven sculptures take the form of plaited mats traditionally made from local plants in her two island homelands of Ireland and the Philippines. In these works, discarded plastic waste—a product of oil extraction—and locally gathered organic materials are processed and hand-woven into the forms of traditional mats. Influenced by time spent in familial homelands witnessing the role that globalized industry plays in the dissolution of cultural practices, she uses material and method hand in hand to explore how the climate crisis has compounded certain inequitable legacies of colonialism.

Her sculptures have been exhibited in Los Angeles at Mata Art Gallery and Adjunct Positions, and internationally at Galleria Duemila (Manila), Stanley Picker Gallery (London), and Horse & Pony (Berlin). She has participated in numerous residency programs, including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (US), Sitka Center for Art & Ecology (US), Emerging Islands (PH) and Cill Rialaig (IE) and her arts writing has been published on platforms like Art Practical. In addition to receiving grants from the Puffin Foundation, California Arts Council and Arts Council Ireland, in 2021 she was a recipient of Mozaik Foundation’s Ecosystem X, an award which recognizes artists using contemporary art as a medium for social change. Carol Anne received her MFA from California College of the Arts, and she is currently based on unceded Tongva land, also known as Los Angeles.

Her presentation at Puón is grounded in an essay she wrote in 2022 that discusses transforming traditions of banig weaving in a changing climate. She will present on the larger framework of her visual arts practice, as well as the research and knowledge gathering that has fostered the development of that practice It will include a segment on the artworks she developed through a self-taught process of mat-weaving to reflect on how traditions necessarily transform in diasporic communities, a result of how migration can separate subsequent generations from old ways of being with the Land. Finally, she will present on the nascent frameworks of the initial phase of her ongoing project, in which she collaborated with bamboo basket weavers in La Union to develop weaveable plastic strips from locally collected marine litter.

Padmapani L. Perez

Padmapani L. Perez is a writer and co-founder of Mt. Cloud Bookshop in Baguio City. Her poems and essays have been anthologized in various Philippine publications, including Agam: Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change (2014). Padma is lead editor of the award-winning anthology, Harvest Moon: Poems and Stories from the Edge of the Climate Crisis (2021), and co-editor of Tiw-tiwong: An Uncyclopedia to Life, Living, and Art in Baguio, the Cordilleras, and Beyond (2022).

From 2019 to 2023, Padma led the creative collaborations of the Agam Agenda, the arts and climate initiative of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities. She received her doctorate in anthropology at Leiden University, Netherlands, and her Masters degree in Environmental Anthropology from the University of Kent at Canterbury. Her work focused on policies and on the role of indigenous peoples in biodiversity conservation in Indonesia and the Philippines. She authored Green Entanglements: Nature Conservation and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Indonesia and the Philippines (2018, University of the Philippines Press), and its companion children’s book, Shelah Goes to a Da-ngah (2016, Alam-am Publishing).

Padma is embarking on a journey that is part-research, part-artistic and literary engagement with sacred trees and singular trees that grow and stand out in unlikely, public or urban spaces. In doing so, she aims to find ways to actively and artistically transform the way we value the presence of trees in our lives and hopes to propagate seeds of new tree-myths that will foster love and respect for other-than-human communities.

Joshua Lim So

Joshua Lim So has received ten Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, is twice awarded by the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition, and was a Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center Fellow for Drama. He has directed several performances, including Joe Cool: Aplikante, Cubao Pagkagat ng Dilim, and Acts of Piracy. His fiction has appeared in A Different Voice: Fiction by Young Filipino Writers, and The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction. He has received citations from Science Fiction Research Association Review, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror 20th Annual Collection, and The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing. He graduated from De La Salle University. Born and raised in Davao City, he is now based in Manila. He is currently working on performances, films and series. The work is an environmental story for children.

Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien

Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien are artists and writers from the US and the Philippines. Together, they have an artistic practice that moves from the Philippines outwards to other places, addressing localized iterations of labor and capital from the perspective of imperial damage. They will be sharing their project "Offerings for Escalante," a traveling exhibition which focuses on the Escalante Massacre (1985), an episode of state violence against a peoples protest which took place during the first Marcos dictatorship. Interweaving testimonials, observations, and materials foraged over the course of an extensive period of research on the plantation island of Negros, and moving across the mediums of film, installation, and drawings on handmade paper, the exhibition aims to shed light on the significance of collective remembrance and mourning in the fight for food sovereignty and land justice.

Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera

Eisa Jocson is a contemporary choreographer and dancer from the Philippines. She exposes body politics in the service and entertainment industry as seen through the unique socioeconomic lens of the Philippines. She studies how the body moves and what conditions make it move – be it social mobility or movement out of the Philippines through migrant work. In all her creations – from pole to macho dancing to princess and to zoo animals – capital is the driving force of movement pushing the indentured body into spatial geographies. She is a recipient of the 2018 Cultural Centre of the Philippines 13 Artists Award, Hugo Boss Asia Art Award 2019, Seoul MediaCity BiennaleSeMa-HANA Award 2021 and the Tabori International Award 2023.

Venuri Perera is a choreographer, performance artist, curator and educator from Colombo. A graduate of DAS Arts, Amsterdam, her solo and collaborative works have dealt with violent nationalism, patriarchy, border rituals, colonial heritage and class. She is exploring the power dynamics of gaze and anonymity through performative experiments in public space, galleries and theatres. Venuri conceived and curated the programmes of Colombo Dance Platform since 2016, with the support of the Goethe-Institut Colombo. She is a member of the multidisciplinary independent artist collective The Packet.

Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera come from countries known for exporting domestic workers. Their research on "Magic Maids" began in 2022 at the Basel Museum of Pharmaceutical History, leading to the Swiss history of witch hunts, their entanglements with the exploitation of domestic labour in the global South.

In Magic Maids, the  broom is an axis that bridges the European witch hunts and domestic labour through rituals of cleansing. The act of sweeping becomes a portal for myriad physical metamorphosis that manifests the historical and ongoing subjugation of migrant women workers. In this evolving exploration, they delve further into these complex connections including how they are implicated.

Uttara Pant

Uttara is an experiential educator based in India. For the last 6 years she has worked in the outdoor and travel education industry, running programs in Nepal and India for high school students. She is currently building her own travel and education company, Willow Experiences that will primarily run programs in Ladakh, India.

A decade ago, she found her way to SECMOL, an alternative school in Phey, Ladakh, where her planned month of volunteering was extended to a yearlong adventure of learning and teaching. SECMOL’s entirely green and sustainable campus is a natural extension of the classroom, and it has continued to inspire and inform her approach to education. Over the course of the year, Uttara developed a deep and enduring connection to Ladakh, which brought her back every year since.

It is that connection that eventually led to her proposed project that aims to combine sustainable living practices, experiential learning and a desire to bring creativity to even the most practical undertakings. Part of a larger project, the work that she will present at the institute is an interactive art and learning space to increase and create an understanding of the importance of the Ladakhi toilet - a locally, sustainably and intelligently designed response to the Ladakhi environment. A kitchen garden and creative space that uses compost from the toilet to grow food, aims to create an experiential understanding of what an intact nutrient cycle looks like. (As opposed to the broken nutrient cycle of flushing our waste.)

Nicola Sebastian

Born in Hong Kong, Nicola Sebastian is a Filipino writer, surfer, and National Geographic Explorer. She is interested in “islandness,” both as space and sensibility. Her work has been published in Orion Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Suspect Journal. Nicola graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, where she was the managing editor of the Columbia Journal and taught fiction writing to undergraduates. She lives in La Union, Philippines, where she cofounded Emerging Islands, an arts-for-ecology collective that brings together artists, environmentalists, and grassroots communities to produce ecological, collaborative, and decolonising stories of the Philippine islands. She is also working on an ecological memoir on disaster, discovery, and the Philippines, and will be sharing the first two sections, Forecast and Landfall, with the Puon Institute.

Joey A. Tabula

Joey A. Tabula is a general internist, poet, editor, and publisher in San Antonio, Zambales. He is the current president of Linangan sa Imahen, Retorika at Anyo (LIRA), Inc. and a board member of Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL). He is editor of six anthologies including From the Eyes of a Healer (2017), Pagninilay: Hinga, Hingal, at Hingalo sa Panahon ng Pandemya (2021), and Rx Narratives: Anthology of Creative Nonfiction of Filipino Internists (2023). He founded the Philippine Society for Literature and Narrative Medicine in 2022.

His work will be a suite of poems centering on decolonizing medicine and reimagining socio-economic justice for Filipinx, speaks to this year's theme, Ecologies of Flourishing.