This project explores the complexity of dual nationality through visual symbolism, using animals to express identity, displacement, and belonging. As someone of Filipino and Irish heritage, I exist between cultures that are geographically and environmentally distinct. This position can create fragmentation, where identity feels divided rather than whole.

The problem addressed is how to represent a dual identity that does not fit within singular cultural narratives. Conventional representations often rely on fixed locations or ideas of cultural purity, which fail to reflect lived hybrid experiences. There is therefore a need for visual approaches that embrace a multitude rather than resolve it.

In response, the project brings together animals from different ecological environments, including snake, fox, Irish deer, carabao, rabbit, and monkey. These animals function as symbols of instinct, place, and cultural association. By placing them together despite their natural incompatibility, the work challenges expectations of belonging, reflecting the reality of existing across worlds.

Each animal is also rooted in personal experience. I have encountered or formed associations with all of them throughout my life, transforming them from abstract symbols into markers of memory. This grounding in lived experience adds authenticity and reinforces the work’s autobiographical nature.

Rather than presenting dual nationality as conflict, the project frames it as coexistence. The unlikely pairing of these animals celebrates difference and resists pressure to conform to singular identity narratives. Ultimately, Kagubatan and Bogland create a visual space in which contradiction is accepted, and hybridity becomes a source of strength.

This project invites viewers to reconsider ideas of place and belonging in a globalised context, where identities are increasingly fluid and interconnected. By constructing an imagined ecosystem, the work proposes that difference does not require resolution, but can exist in balance, offering an alternative understanding of identity formation.