My Headspace, Currently: Asian Futurism, Decolonized Technology & Ecological Transformation
Last year, as part of a biodesign workshop, I had to collect some mushrooms from a tree in the park. Only now, a whole year later, am I realizing how consequential this experience was going to be for my to-be graduation project.
Because in the Philippines, the belief in engkantos, or nature spirits, is a big part of our culture, I felt that I couldn’t take a piece of mushroom from the Dutch tree without its permission. I grew up around stories about my friends, family and acquaintances getting unexplainably sick because they stepped over a mound of dirt (where dwarves are believed to live) or cut down a tree where a spirit supposedly dwelled, without asking for permission. Even in my professional life, these are things I needed to take into account when designing for clients’ homes. One contractor I was working with, for example, found bruises all over his body, which wouldn’t go away even after months, because he had ignorantly cut down a tree that our client warned him not to touch. Our client then had to invite a witch doctor to the house to perform a ritual so the bruises would go away. So, out of respect (and, admittedly, fear), as I was about to take some mushrooms from that Dutch tree’s trunk, I told it I meant no harm.
This felt strange, though. I asked myself, do nature spirits even exist in this part of the world? Thinking about it now, maybe they should.
Today, most Filipinos abide by more Western ideals. But before we were colonized by Spain, we lived in a world of magic; spiritual leaders were women instead of men -- female shamans called babaylans. Things are much different now. The monstrosities of modern technology have brought about not only human exploitation, total warfare and environmental devastation but all sorts of psychopathologies as well. We believe in data more than we do our own senses and we listen to other people more than we listen to ourselves. No wonder encounters of engkantos are becoming increasingly rare.
Looking at how modern technology exploits nature and how my own spiritual beliefs shape my natural interactions, I wondered what modern technology might look like if it were instead developed through more “archaic” spiritual and ontological sensibilities. How might we change our reality from one of causality and commodification to one of connectedness?