Creative Collectivity:
Towards Collaborative Living Symposium
As the world faces the disasters of genocide, imperial fascism, climate change, and ever-intensifying racial capitalist wars of dispossession and extraction, people continue their struggles to sustain themselves and their communities through collective and collaborative means. Against state and corporate abandonment, predation, and corruption, which have thrown people into conditions of precarity and catastrophe, more and more people are searching for and relying on new, improvised, and inherited practices of socially shared life to support their own as well as their community’s very survival and sustenance, their endeavors to live freely and thrive, their aspirations and dreams of other worlds and futures. More than ever, these cooperative practices and relations are all that stand between people’s imperiled lifeworlds and their extinction.
The 2026 Puón Institute brings artists, writers, scholars, and activists who work on or within these emerging collaborative social environments and networks to explore and share the visions, practices, and challenges of collective and collaborative living and working.
Key questions for exploration will include: What is the world of our dreams? In the act of collectively dreaming, what forms of sociality emerge? How can collectives serve as innovative means of sociality, emphasizing interdependence and mutual reliance not only for survival but toward a life well-lived? Who, what, and where do current collectivities turn to for sources of renewal? In addition to exploring various forms, practices, and challenges of collectives and collaborative living, the Puón Institute gathering highlights the growing significance of communality and collectivization as essential methods of living at this time.
Heather Ann F. Pulido is a Kankanaey-Ibaloy woman teaching, writing, and living in Baguio City. She writes in English, Filipino, Kankanaey, and Ilokano. Her work has appeared in Ani, Bannawag, and other magazines. One of her children’s stories won a prize in the 70th Carlos Palanca Awards. She contributes to the film-focused platform SINEGANG.ph and the up-and-coming travel publication, The Archipelago Press. She has also edited poetry for the US-based “anti-literary magazine” JAKE.
An alumna of the Ed Maranan Kid Lit Writing Workshop, Unang Palihang Rene O. Villanueva, and Room to Read’s Sugilanon Workshop, Heather has mentored writers in DLSU’s Luntiang Palihan, UPB’s Cordillera Creative Writing Workshop (CCWW), and Benguet’s Ped-agan Writing Workshop. She is a member of the LGBT writers' collective Kinaiya and Ubbog Cordillera Writers. In 2024, she co-founded ili press, an indie publisher that champions stories and writers from North Luzon through zine anthologies, zine fairs, and free writing workshops.
Risha is one of the editors at ili press, a free digital and print platform based in the Cordilleras. She’s also part of Kinaiya, an LGBTQIA+ writers collective, of which she is an alumna of its first Palihang Kinaiya. As an aspiring speculative fiction writer, she lifts the veil of what is seen as ordinary and exposes its gutsy underbelly.
She authored ‘The Cuil Theory’ (Bente-Bente Zine) co-authored the novel ‘Escaping Emily’ (Thirty West Publishing), “Juvenile Womanhood” in Accla’t Kinaiya, and published her first zine “I Pray for Peace, I Crave for Silence”. Some of her works have also appeared in Cape Magazine, Novice Magazine, The Coffee Ring Review, and Porch Litmag. When she’s not writing or making art, she’s playing video games, terrorizing her dogs, or trying to overthrow the capitalist patriarchy. She’s currently based in Baguio City.
Abi Dango is a cultural worker who works as a director and editor for film productions, a programmer for SineSadya Pop-up Cinema, and an editor at ili press, a writing organization by Cordillerans, for Cordillerans. Across roles, she employs a historical-dialectical materialist lens to ground both mediums in progressive causes.
Nam Desembrana is a film enthusiast envisioning more spaces that connect people through movies. Currently, engaging in data analytics and visualization projects for social good, while co-programming for SineSadya.
Giah De los Reyes (b. 2002, Iloilo, Philippines) is a Milan-based interdisciplinary artist and founder of Katawhayan (www.katawhayan.com). Her work explores migration, care infrastructures, natural dye ecologies, and Filipino lifeworlds across transnational contexts. She has worked in community-based projects with incarcerated women in female dormitory jails in the Visayas and with rural children in a secluded village in Negros Island, using arts-based participatory methods to foster connection, healing, and storytelling. Her ongoing research, to live in condition, investigates the relationships between plants, people, and place through natural dyeing, fieldwork, media, and collaborative workshops. She is currently a collaborator for Voyaging Vapors: Plant Histories of Architecture (www.voyagingvapors.com) and a 2025 Prince Claus Seed Award recipient.
Ezekiel Sales is an artist and researcher whose work revolves around food systems and geography. His practice centers on collective modes of learning through performance, spatial practice, and gardening. He is part of the ongoing Performance Ecologies supported by Goethe-Institut Philippinen, and a collaborator with the (m)other-child space The O Home based in Metro Manila. He has co-facilitated workshops internationally, including Grounding Soils in Southeast Asia for the International Convention of Asia Scholars (2024), and Amihan Monsoon Medley at the Asia Pacific Feminist Forum (2024) with The O Home, exploring soil and meteorological relations through an embodied mapping practice.
He was artist in residence for Song of the Wind in South Korea (2023), where he delved on a performance research on the northeast monsoon passing to the country’s physical and cultural landscapes including mythologies, shamanic traditions and seaweed industry. He is a contributing author to Halo-Halo Ecologies: Food and Environment Studies in the Philippines (University of Hawai‘i Press), with the chapter “A Pantry of Things: Care Work and Carceral Arrangements in Food (and) Activism.”
Eya Beldia engages with contemporary art through her experiences in creative communication strategies and art historical research, which are in turn informed by previous studies that looked at the relations between design and art education in New York City and Manila. She studies Art History at the Department of Art Studies in the College of Arts and Letters in the University of the Philippines - Diliman, where she previously taught. Her independent research initiative, ARAYA, has been supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and the Japan Foundation. At present, she works with cultural alliances that seek to defend and promote human rights, alongside pursuing an independent practice in cultural and curatorial work in the Philippines.
J.J. Lopez-Buenaventura is a full-time cultural activist in the Ilocos Region of the Philippines. He was born and raised in San Fernando, La Union. His works revolve around producing visual narratives for fisherfolk and peasant communities, regional environmental campaigns, and anti-corruption movements in the Ilocos Region.
Through the years, he collaborated with the founding of artist collectives and formations, including Pelicula Union, Rissik Amianan Cultural Collective, Dalikan La Union Youth Artist Collective, and Sirpat La Union Street Photography.
Edward Kenneth Lazaro Nadurata is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Global and International Studies with Graduate Emphases in Medical Humanities and Asian American Studies and a lecturer in the Department of Asian American Studies at California State University, Northridge. He currently serves as Assistant Editor for the Journal of Asian American Studies and ALON: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies. His research explores the intersections of aging, retirement, care, and labor in the Philippines and its diaspora.
Shaunnah Ysabel Cledera is a teacher, zine-maker, and researcher of Philippine literary history who lives and works in Los Baños, Laguna. She is one of the co-founders of critical arts collective Magpies Press, a collective dedicated to experiments in collaboration and DIY publishing. She actively works with the organizing team of Better Living Through Xeroxography, a small press expo. She has written on collaborative zines as intimate texts during the Duterte regime and archived Philippine metrical romances, their orality as object, and their depictions of women.
Donna Miranda (b. 1979) and Angelo V. Suarez (b. 1984) are activists who volunteer for the Federation of Agricultural Workers (Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura, UMA). As artists, they work at the intersection of choreography and poetry with a focus on their materiality and the conditions of their production. Trained as a dancer, Miranda is preoccupied with how movement is written; conversely, trained as a poet, Suarez is preoccupied with how text is produced by movement.
LeAnn Palisoc, born and raised in La Union, is passionate about strengthening culture for the Ilokano people as she believes in the importance of holding space for conversations on how to preserve and cultivate life. She is the bookshop manager of Puon Bookshop where progressive literature and events are held. LeAnn currently heads LEONA, a women’s collective that is homegrown and centered in La Union. Founded just recently in 2024, it aims to respond to the needs of women and children in the locality. LEONA has conducted various projects such as outreach programs for calamity aftermaths, community events in partnership with the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library and local collectives, as well as calls for good governance. LEONA continues to grow in number with members who share the eagerness to fight for the rights of the voiceless and partake in purposeful movement for the collective’s advocacies.
Franchesca Casauay (b. 1984) is a cultural worker with a transdisciplinary practice, working in contemporary performance, new media, and hybrid formats. She holds a degree in sociology from UP Diliman and provides year-round curatorial, production, arts management, research, and artistic support for various partners and communities. She has worked with numerous international & local organizations and festivals, with past and ongoing projects across Asia, Europe, and Australia.
At present she is artistic collaborator and production manager of Eisa Jocson's "The Filipino Superwoman Band," which premiered at the 14th Sharjah Biennial (2019) and has toured in Europe, with an upcoming show at the Singapore Biennale in Jan 2026. Other recent engagements include co-facilitator of Performance Ecologies, a Filipino contemporary performance platform supported by Goethe Institut Philippinen, and co-curator and production lead for Sincerely Yours, the Philippines festival for dance, performance, and karaoke presented by Kunstler*innenhaus Mousonturm in Germany in Sep 2025. In the past, she has served as guest curator for public programs at the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020) and was a fellow of Japan Foundation Asia Center's Next Gen Producing Performing Arts program (2018-2019).
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been actively involved in supporting the local artist and activist networks in her neighborhood in Quezon City, where she lives, works, and plays.
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is a feminist scholar of Philippine culture and global political economy and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of the books, Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004). Her most recent books are: Remaindered Life (Duke University Press, 2022), an extended meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire, and Life-times of Becoming-Human (Everything’s Fine Press, 2022), a treatise on life expenditure and global humanity. Tadiar is founding Director of the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library and PUÓN Books, Arts, Design in San Fernando, La Union, Philippines. In this capacity, she has organized a series of artist-led creative workshops, art and community exhibitions, and cultural events, as well as embarked on the co-publication of a series of books on local history and women’s issues.
L MSP Burns is an Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA, a land grant institution in the homeland of Gabrielino/Tongva peoples. Burns’s writings include Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Global Empire (NYU Press, 2014 Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies by the Asian American Studies Association) and the co-edited anthology California Dreaming: Place and Movement in Asian American Imaginary (2020, University of Hawai’i Press).
As a dramaturg, Burns has collaborated with BIPOC inter/multidisciplinary theatre- and dance-makers, including David Rousseve/REALITY; Leilani Chan/TeAda Productions; Priya Srinivasan; Jay Carlon; and R. Zamora Linmark. Burns initiated a survey project assessing the impact of the pandemic on Asian American theatre organizations and individual theatre artists. This initiative grew into a team of multi-racial artists and academics, geographically based throughout the United States, broadening the surveys to gauge the impact of the pandemic on BIPOC theatre practitioners and BITOC.
The Institute received support from the following institutions:
Dr. Allan Punzalan Isaac is Professor of American Studies and of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ. He is a founding member and served as co-Director of the Global Asias Initiative. He specializes in Asian American and comparative race studies and examines issues around migration, postcoloniality, gender and sexuality, and the Philippines and its diaspora. His first book American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America was the recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award. His second book is entitled, Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor. His current research is on visual culture and death in diaspora.
Alfredo F Tadiar Library’s 2026 Puón Institute’s Creative Collectivity Symposium received support from Rutgers University American Studies & Global Asias.
Former Puón Institute fellows supporting and attending the 2026 symposium include: Lyra Garcellano, Benj Meamo III, Eisa Jocson, Ivan Emil A. Labayne, Ea Torrado, and Luna Beller Tadiar. To learn more about previous Puón Institutes, visit here.
Project Assistant:
Lk Rigor is a cultural worker based in Manila whose practice moves along the matrices of researching, writing, curating, and archiving.
The Alfredo F. Tadiar Library was established in December 2017 in San Fernando, La Union as an independent reading and research library, free and open to the public, with PUÓN serving as its supporting space of public outreach and engagement.