Bahay Kubo, Kàhit Munti!
Bahay Kubo, Kàhit Munti! Foreign Plants, Local People
10 January, 2026
An experimental workshop on extracting plant-pigments with vegetables from the Bahay Kubo song, co-led with Dr. Will Davis as part of Voyaging Vapors: Plant Histories of Plantation Architectures (www.voyagingvapors.com)
Sourcing the vegetables at San Fernando Public Market
Kàhit Munti (even small) teaches that value is not scale and profit but in care, knowledge, and relationality. This open workshop for children and adults asks questions about the bahay kubo, its song, and its imagined garden of plants, of which some are foreign and some are local. We will ask questions, sing the song, and experiment with making a map/floorplan with vegetables together on textile.
Even a tiny plot of land and a small house can host abundance ecologically, socially, and ethically. The bahay kubo’s celebratory song has been sung by schoolchildren from the 1920s onwards, when schools began to formalize Filipino as the national language. The song emphasizes one house with a small garden plot of eighteen vegetables. But is this a reality or myth? How many of these vegetables originally came from other places? And have traditional farming cultures in the archipelago really relied on only one-house one-plot, as opposed to a community of people sharing resources, such as in kaingin practices (crop rotation)?
Even while the bahay kubo portrays small, localized practices that might resist extraction and sustain life, is it a sustainable dream or individualistic fantasy?
