CZARINA

Happy Pride Month 🌈✨

Celebrating the beauty, resilience, and brilliance of LGBTQIA+ communities — especially Pride POC, whose voices, stories, and contributions continue to shape our world.

As a gender-queer Filipino-Spanish-American with deep Indigenous roots and a fourth-generation descendant of the Filipino Babaylan Dakot of Nueva Ecija, I carry a lineage that reaches back to the pre-colonial Philippines. The Babaylan were revered spiritual leaders, healers, and custodians of ancestral wisdom — roles held predominantly by women, as well as some men and feminine-presenting individuals entrusted with sacred responsibilities. They emerged from Indigenous societies where women often held significant authority and where gender diversity was acknowledged long before colonial rule imposed more rigid binaries.

Long before modern society as we know it took shape, gender diversity was not merely acknowledged — it was often understood, respected, and woven into the fabric of community life. The idea that identity exists beyond rigid binaries is not new; it is rooted in traditions and ways of knowing that long predate the systems that sought to erase them.

Happy Pride. 🌈

For Monochrome Monday 🖤🩶 Looking back at “Exoskeleto” from the LP “Empire” (2024) about biomechanical, exoskeletal astral anomalies inspired by the great HR Geiger. I always wanted to create a dark synthpop / industrial pop track inspired by his universe. Pinnacle of 80s dark high art.