Genius of the Wild: On becoming duwende and asking why the soft earth worries for us

By Lady Kyla Balibagoso

I’ll never forget the first sip of remembering, of rewilding. How could something so overlooked perfectly satiate your being? How could the soil awaken a sleeping mystic? Even now, I feel its pulse coursing through my veins, reminding me of its magic and the mystery of liberation.

I had known this truth, that there was more to us than what instantly meets the eye. More than chaos, greed, and unfathomable cruelty. Somewhere along the way, we may have forgotten something, something that slips away amidst the endless events that sever our ties to each other.

In November 2025, Kikik Kollektive founders Marrz Capanang and Kristine Buenavista introduced me to a unique form of zine-making. It wasn’t for mass production or structure, but for slowing down and letting one’s personal voice be a guide. That day, during a crash-course workshop in preparation for Project Palabasa, a community library in Guimbal, we gathered with warm tea in hand, magazines and scratch papers scattered across the table. We began something unexpectedly transformative.

The past weeks have been especially significant. On February 1, 2026, we launched our first zine-making activity as a kollektive: Becoming Duwende: Zine Workshop and Zineing Together at 9:04 Resto Café and Events. In the space we created, we learned each other’s stories through listening, looking, and feeling. Designed by Kristine Buenavista and inspired by Kidlat Tahimik’s metaphor of the Filipino duwende, the workshop invited us to root deeply in community-engaged practices and to honor local distinction amid global homogeneity. It became a process of reclaiming, of giving something its rightful place. For each of us, that something was a duwende, a creature so magical it put us under a spell.

Following this, the wind guided us to Barotac Viejo, where we partnered with its Local Government Unit and Tourism Office for Arts Month on February 28, 2026. Bringing this magic back to the soil that raised you is something else entirely. My heart felt full, not with pain but with a profound connection. Perhaps it was our desire to share this space or the stories that had waited too long to be heard. We asked the community what made Barotac Viejo special, and they answered with depth, their hearts, their roots, their truth. Returning home, reflecting, and looking inward, it was a gift to see the natural world through the lens of a grassroots community, especially one from your own hometown.

There is a particular whimsy in meeting someone whose energy manifests in every genuine story shared. On March 3, 2026, under the blood moon, we entered the realm of the duwende, the small, unseen guardians of the earth who, according to lore, reveal themselves only to those who remember how to look. The attunement to these magical creatures was guided by Kidlat Tahimik, the Father of Philippine Indie Cinema, whose art sparked the beginnings of this mystical movement.

For Kidlat, duwendes are more than playful beings. They are guides. They are the inner creativity of an artist, gentle but rebellious. He reminded us that in a world that insists on sterile sameness, shaped by algorithms and rigid structures, we must resist. We must remove our eyes from the sky and look down, look within.

The system hums with quiet insistence, turning us into its machines, pushing us toward straight lines, bureaucracy, and colonial tics. Yet not everything must be measured, explained, or colonized. If we trade the elusive wisdom of the duwende for a cold, homogenous society, we lose a vital part of our soul, our Filipino soul. We lose the capacity for wonder.

Kidlat’s philosophy calls us to dwell in enchanted spaces. To become, in a sense, duwende ourselves. To be a duwende is to be highly attentive and intentional, feeling texture, smell, every detail of creation. It is to guard our spirit and the stories whispered by our ancestors against the loudness of the global mainstream. It is a quiet, transformative act of defiance.

He spoke of indio-genius, a beautiful play of words highlighting our natural wildness, our innate self. This spirit allows us to experience the advancements of today without being poisoned or colonized by them. Our roots are never a shackle, they are our source. Kidlat’s duwende guides us to frame the world in our own way. It asks, what is your personal myth? Who is the spirit guide living in your chest?

On March 7, 2026, we brought this awareness to Ilahas nga Iloilo with the National Museum of the Philippines – Visayas. In that space, we felt the interplay of our bodies, the natural world, and the lives we shape. The ground shifted beneath our feet as our stories wove together. We revered the wildness inside and around us, never forsaking it, only kneeling before its greatness. After all, this was life before it was arranged.

We asked ourselves, when will we finally look back and remember our smallness among tall trees, not nth-story buildings? Political unrest and ecological strain are symptoms of a world that forgot how to listen. But if we pause, if we quiet the machinery separating us from what is innate, we begin to hear, stories brushing against stories, the farmer’s rhythm meeting the fisherman’s tide, a community moving like a river that always finds its way to the sea.

Perhaps it is all the cement that stops our feet from kissing the ground. No wonder we have forgotten the maternal nurturance of the earth. That is why the wind carries its remnants, so the soil can remind us to return before we lose ourselves.

Every zine, every act of looking back into our wildness, every awakened duwende is an invitation to stop rushing. To kneel, to peer under the porch of our own consciousness. For it is there, in the small and unseen, that our wild and our duwende wait. And it is there, in that quiet attention, that we find not just art, but ourselves.

Even now, I feel the pulse of it through my veins, the magic, the mystery, and the liberation. Some awakenings are beginnings, the start of seeing, of remembering. And so, this is an invitation into that world.