haven luya
they/them/love
self-portrait with yarrow. unceded Ohlone Lands, May 2025.
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, queer eco-erotics, and the land on which they are uncolonizing, they practice ritual movement performance, orasyon (spoken word), ceremonial tattoo in(k)vocation, and pyrographically-activated altarwork to re-myth (tr)ancestral resilience technologies and re-member embodied belonging. Rooted in loving justice, they 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 an installation and performance, “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,” were featured in Earlando Paus’ SDFF Award Winning Short Film, “Glimpse,” 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 to co-conspire with the land and others.
explore recent works
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Tadhana: New Rituals for Reconciliation
Tadhana is an altar activation and poetic performance that (trans)vestigates contending body-memories of my intractability, shame, and non-belonging and offers Catholicism’s transfiguration into earth-based practices as a framework toward regenerative repair across lineages of domination, trauma, and separation.
curator: hamsa la fae with Viet Voices AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship
opening performance: 07/26/2025 at El Salon, San Ysidro.
photos: nanzi muro. edits by haven luya
In Tadhana, the snake as monster-aswang-devil is reclaimed as a symbol of ancestral protection and sacred steward of the cycles of life-death-rebirth - permission to move from the rigidity of narratives indoctrinated and inherited; to (re)shape our body into a myth that con(tends) our complexity.
Blue Heron – Ritual Tattoo In(k)Vocation
performance: Ieodo Sana, seh-reum. part of “The Land We Carry” Exhibition, Viet Voices AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship. Summer 2025.
world waters. blue heron prayers. grief ritual with seh-reum.
ICE helicopters circling as you reminded us that water cannot be contained. it transmutes. it calls. gathers. each of us the drop, the bowl, the hands, the memories woven between.
-haven luya
Pine PhalloPlasty
ongoing inquiry of (trans)masculinity
self-portraits on Klamath Land, 2025
the (trans)plant was a success. pine pollen tincture direct deposit sex change. traded full bush for needles. to pluck and steep in hot water. vitamin c stands for cvnt. drinking prevents scurvy when the sun bends over for the moon. scurvy (adj) - the violent need to tend the womb. cone is gonad. seed wraps itself into the home - sack. they break open in the next fire - my crotch. a broken limb is all i’ve ever wanted. caress my thigh. plummet into soil. grounded. swallowed. planted penetration.
…. trans vengeance mourning vengeance moaning vengeance creating vengeance trans ….
“have you had the surgery yet?”
Communion
ongoing inquiry into “mixed-mythweaving” (a theoretic lens that invites complexity through mixed-race experience)
Pyrographically activated pine altar. Symbolic story informed by Celtic knotwork, Visayan/Tagalog Batok, Baybayin. K
Installation and Photography by haven luya. Kumeyaay Land, 2024.
Together, the altar (the portal) imbued with ancestral symbols (the communication) are a living, breathing, dancing extension of Self/soma across time and place. Both the Picts (of scottish/celtic exchange) and Visayan peoples were referred to as “The Painted Ones/People” for adorning their bodies, their vessels, in permanent markings made of ash, water, and needle. As animists, they had deep reverence to the elements and cosmos, and were informed by seasonal/lunar cycles for herbal medicine, regenerative agriculture, rituals, and more.
While these beliefs and legacies fundamentally inform luya entangled… My altar and my practice does not exist in a vacuum of idyllic ancestral animistic beliefs devoid of recognizing the present landscape of sociopolitical polycrises nor the traumas our ancestors experienced and inflicted upon one another. As a white-bodied, trans, mixed creature, shaped by upbringing and presence in the belly of empire, this altar is a place where my ancestors and I can tend to the deep wounds of imperialism, extraction, and colonization together. We can have dialogue across our differences, reckon and repair, sing and exchange foods, and honor the complexity within (Our)Selves. The more i honor myself in my wholeness, the more i can hold change with others cultivating a justice movement centered on love, care, connection, and belonging.
works
selection of works spanning photography, ceremonial handpoke in(k)vocation, mixed media, drawing.
Catch presence, release reactivity.
wade patiently through cataclysmic currents,
wings at the back, hooks for feet.
find them amongst sea-churned stones
where land, water, and wind meet.
chest a space for filling. that hollow, harrowing cavity. what goes in? breath? belonging? the feather-light touch of dreams dawning?
stay. be still. the slow pulse is an indomitable force.
luya entangled 