In CAVITEÑA, I stage my transgender body as both subject and witness, bringing together self-portraits, images of the land, and personal writings to confront my gender dysphoria and reimagine my relationship with a body and a world I have struggled to inhabit.
I made these images as proof that I exist in a world that does not know how to hold me.
I grew up in the hinterlands of Cavite, a Philippine province just outside the capital. I am the eldest child of a farmer and a homemaker. The land was quiet and expansive, and so was the self I was expected to become. But something in me knew I was different. I felt it in a longing that had no language yet. The city gave me that language, but transitioning did not guarantee acceptance. I spent years avoiding mirrors, making myself smaller, chasing a womanhood built from other people's definitions. I was becoming but also disappearing.
This work is the answer to that disappearing.
Creating these images is an exercise in masochism. It means wrestling with the discomfort of being perceived, each photograph serving as a reminder that I exist in a body the world reads before I have had the chance to speak. A body that does not fit the grammar of its place becomes exotic by force, not because it is foreign, but because the world around it has learned to recognize difference only through otherness. Estrangement from land becomes estrangement from body; estrangement from body becomes, always, a kind of exile.
Here, the body is not spectacle. It is an offering. I find in viriditas, the life-giving force that Hildegard von Bingen believed moved through all living things, another way to imagine my place within nature. Wherever I find myself, I return to the land in an act of lamentation that does not refuse the possibility of reconciliation. In this evocation of the magical tropical, I ask: What if the body I was taught to understand as unnatural has always been part of creation? Might I, too, take root and grow here?
These images are not only evidence of my existence, but an attempt to understand what belonging might feel like. In the land that made me. In the body I inhabit. In the self I am still, slowly, learning to look at without flinching.
