haven luya
they/them/love
self::portrait with beloved yarrow
haven luya is devoted to cultivating a praxis that mutually worships the tensioned and generative stories woven in our soma-scapes. with reverence to archipelagic animist and herbalist technologies of their tagalog and celtic lineages, and the land on which they are uncolonizing, they practice ceremonial tattoo in(k)vocation, ritual poetic performance, and pyrographically-activated altarwork to re-myth (tr)ancestral resilience technologies and re-member embodied belonging. haven’s work emerges rhizomatically across trans eco-erotics, mixed-body mythweaving, ancestral inquiry, and loving justice to coalesce interactive installations and earth-guided containers that interrogate how we might disrupt and heal from patterns of domination perpetuated in our intimate and intergenerational relationships.
A recipient of Viet Voice’s inaugural AAPI Artist Fellowship, haven recently birthed and performed their work “Tadhana: New Rituals for Reconciliation” as part of the The Land We Carry exhibition. Within the last few solar cycles, they debuted their “Trans Plant Poetics” for the La Jolla Playhouse Queer Variety Show, engaged in land-mythography and resistance crafting with Babay L. Angeles’ “Olongapo Disco: Creature Myth Across the Diaspora,” and had literary and digital artwork published in Combos Press Queer Earth Food 3 and Querencia Press, Not Ghosts But Spirits Vol II. Born and residing most of their life on the unceded lands of the Kumeyaay people (so-called San Diego), you can find this genderfluid transsexual creature emerging rhizomatically across turtle island.
recent works
the myth of luya
𓇢𓆸.
luya is pungent. provocative.
it offers new relation-scapes
for trans-mythic belonging.
luya is a solarized summation of matrilineal kapwa.
reverence to ensoiled fertility,
devotion to the tidal forces of cyclical creation.
luya is fractalization praxis.
scattered diaspora,
mixed-race multiplicity.
nodal re-emergence from
obliterated edges of (un)certainty.
𓇢𓆸 luya is an ecosystemic entanglement. what fractals first rests, listens. in the dark it sprouts nodes. pushes skyward. collects sun. feeds soil. in time the body engorged. rooted and unruly.
𓇢𓆸 as a ginger (red-head) pilipinx being of tangled roots and fluid gender, re-membering my pre-colonial visayan and tagalog knowledge through myth, ceremony, and healing practices has opened portals for reckoning with and integrating my white-bodied ancestors of celtic, slavic, and germanic descent. as i go further back, deeper into the soils of time and body-memory, i know how their stories are entwined within me, with this earth, with the Indigenous land i am on, and all of liberation.
𓇢𓆸 wherever i am planted, however disembodied i feel by the forces of oppression or past traumas surfacing in shadows and shame, the familiar and ancestral call of luya brings me home to my expansive body. it is through honoring my conflicts and re-connecting to generative sources of relation that i am wholly enstoried. fully ensoiled. luya entangled.
learn more about rhizomatic reciprocity.
luya entangled 