I felt all six tropical cyclones that hit the Philippines last November through my screen, which was flooded with images and narratives of our fragile disaster management systems in the face of climate change. We were, as always, taken by surprise. It was murky to trace hope in these calls for mutual aid, damage reports, and the ecopolitical monologues of popular livestreamer Arman Salon — knowing that these were the lived realities of many, including me.
In response, I looked to the arts — specifically, The Possibility of Forests, a project by artist duo Mica Cabildo and Curtis Cresswell using digital technology and public art to connect the forests of the Philippines and Wales. Their online gallery contains augmented reality (AR) trails and digital installations, 360-degree forest footage, documentary films, and AR filters inspired by the ecosystems they visited: moisture-laden cloud forests (also called mossy forests) in the Philippines, and rare temperate rainforests (known as Celtic rainforests) in Wales.
The website contains no lengthy descriptive texts or calls to action; the only suggestion you get is to use specific web browsers for a better user experience. It is a playful and interactive web-based field trip through the forests — but one which implicitly conveys the gravity of the climate crisis and the importance of our relationships with these ecosystems.
Closing the distance
To many of us, the forest has become a distant concept. When I scrolled through Cabildo and Cresswell’s digital installations, I recalled a striking report indicating that human “learning and inspiration” from nature, in the light of decreased diversity of and proximity to nature, has been on a global downward trend over the past 50 years. City dwellers with limited personal resources — including time, money, and energy — don’t go to the forests on Monday mornings.
In such situations, ecological art projects, especially in digital spaces, can enrich our experience and understanding of the natural world. Creative technologies can get us to the forests without the mud and leeches. They are not a perfect substitute, but a viable pathway to having more-than-human encounters.
For The Possibility of Forests, Cabildo and Cresswell turned their experiences in the Philippine and Welsh forests into three different online digital paths: the 98B Exhibition Trail, designed to be experienced on-site in Manila, the 360 Forest Trail, and the DIY Exploration Trail. They also went the extra mile to consider their audience by providing additional materials on social media about cloud and Celtic forest ecosystems, current threats, and conservation efforts.The Possibility of Forests is a labour to bend distance between the forests and the spaces we are currently in.
The two Forest Trails through Wales and the Philippines feature 360-degree footage, substituting the curious movements of your neck and eyes through the forest with the movements of your mouse across the screen. In my apartment on a stormy day, I browsed through the Welsh forests, taking in unfamiliar features such as bogs, black pools, and dog lichens encountered only in English fantasy literature.
The Philippine landscapes, on the other hand, brought feelings of the familiar. Mount Apo and the Bamboo Peak were known to me due to my Bagobo roots, and Mount Makiling appeared almost as an old friend. I recalled comforting memories of going for a holiday hike with friends, forest bathing on the Flat Rocks, and watching an orb spider respinning its cobweb after a gentle rain. I had also previously done biodiversity work at the foot of Mount Makiling (so I did go to the forest on Monday mornings!) These memories brought warmth and a sense of anticipation, as I looked forward to recreating similar experiences once the current storms had passed through.
Forests, politics, identities
Field Notes from a Mossy Forest is a short documentary film the artists made on their visit to Mount Apo with a local conservation group and the Bantay Bukid (forest rangers) from the Obu Manuvu. The forest may be a geographical location, but, to a few, it is also a living entity capable of reciprocating the actions and energies with which she is treated.
“Everyone is welcome to the forest,” says Ferlix Landim, chairman of the Obu Manuvu Bantay Bukid, in a video caption posted by Cresswell on social media. “The forest belongs to everybody. It provides water for everyone. We only ask that people respect the forest and help us protect it.”
The film also makes evident the fragility of the systems protecting our forests. Land-rights activists and environmental protectors in the Philippines are red-tagged (i.e., labelled as subversives), criminalised, and even killed, making it Asia’s deadliest country for environmental defenders.
While filming, the team observed a Tricytis imeldae, a toad lily flower which is not only a bioindicator of a healthy watershed, but also a species surrounded by complex ecopolitical narratives. This toad lily is named after the wife of a late Filipino dictator, whose regime was powered in part by logging the forests and displacing cultural communities from their ancestral lands. The toad lily flower was also said to be used by a tribe called the Tasaday to attract frogs while hunting — but the characterisation of the Tasaday as an isolated “Stone Age” tribe has since been widely criticised as a hoax, one with political and economic motivations. For the eagle-eyed viewer, the forest is indeed full of such conflicts, clashes, and complicated stories.
In the film, a forest ranger banks on the possibility of the birds, trees, and landscape being experienced by the next generation. The film also notes that the area protected by the rangers supplies freshwater to Davao City.
Yet, these forest rangers work under informal job arrangements, with their income often coming from fundraising. On the city’s part, it would be a gesture of reciprocity to channel securities (kaseguruhan) to the forest rangers and cultural communities that conserve these ecosystems.
I brought forests on my errands
Amidst typhoons and suspensions of work, I was fixing a taxation mishap. I brought the forests with me through the DIY Exploration Trail, placing the AR object installations in my actual locations. I placed the Abercorris Nature Reserve installation on the busy Maharlika Highway, on a Monday morning while people were hurrying to work. The Celtic Rainforests were my companions in a bustling business district as I endured this professional obligation. I made Blodeuwedd face the building where my taxes go.
We have evolved — in our professional lives especially — to despise slowness or gaps, labouring only half-consciously under conditions which force us to never stop. Typhoons had washed away copies of tax returns and work cancellations had caused further administrative complications. Yet, tax forms contain no boxes or fields to account for these climate narratives.
The installations became my sanctuaries in the concrete jungle, and The Green Man my final resistance to the systems that pushed me to comply. As I set up the AR object in the business district, it eased my frustrations as I fantasised about forest futures.
Fantasies of forest futures
There is a valid space and time in which someone can consume (ecological) art while not actively resisting certain systems, fantasising solutions, or ruminating about their role in a movement. It is okay to come to art seeking a recess.
Of course, both kinds of experience can coexist. While The Possibility of Forests referenced ancientness and legend more than it inquired into the futures of forests, future-oriented questions still occur in the mind and musings of the viewer-explorer like me, reimagining lives closely connected to these ecosystems while navigating and surviving current eco-personal crisis. As our daily lives have been continuously evolving away from the trees and symbiotically towards screens, ecological arts in digital spaces can nurture a niche where we have more personal agency over the degradation of our affinity to nature.
With all of these experienced realities, undoubtedly the arts, the forests, and I are climate-sensitives.
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The exhibition The Possibility of Forests: Twin Installations in a Celtic Rainforest and a Tropical Cloud Forest took place at the First United Building in Manila from 30 October to 9 November 2025, with the support of 98B Collaboratory and the British Council in the Philippines. The online gallery may still be accessed at sunny-loving-forest.glitch.me.
Header image: A screen capture of the Mount Apo summit on the 360 Forest Trail.
