In Baguio, Filipino National Artist for Film Kidlat Tahimik and Katrin de Guia give a glimpse into their family’s dwelling place, a product of “jamming with the cosmos.”
In the film Ang Lakaran ni Kabunyan, a young father sets out on a long road trip from Baguio to Davao, where he plans to relocate his family. After loading a mustard yellow VW Combi nicknamed Jambalaya with balikbayan boxes, Kabunyan’s father, the Filipino National Artist Kidlat Tahimik, tells his son, “I hope you find whatever it is you are looking for.” The Baguio of his childhood has been disappearing along with its oldest trees, and so Kabunyan seeks a new life where his children will be surrounded by community and nature. Both men have the tacit understanding that the object ultimately being sought in this journey is Liwanag. On the road and across bodies of water, Kabunyan gleans morsels of this enlightenment, clarity, and understanding as he encounters culture bearers and wisdom keepers.
Kabunyan’s voyage echoes the lakaran his mother Katrin began over two decades earlier, when she decided to plunge into the Filipino psyche in order to understand the people of the country she now called home. Katrin de Guia, a native of Munich, Germany, was an art student when she first met the artist formerly named Eric de Guia, who appeared like a vision driving a red sarimanok-painted jeepney through the streets of her university, stopping beside her and her then-boyfriend to invite them to an exhibition. It was a cosmic crossroads: Eric de Guia, an economic consultant, was pivoting toward the life of an artist, having torn up, Katipunero-style, his MBA diploma from Wharton. Katrin later asked him to move into an artist commune in the countryside, where he unloaded his inventory of Olympic mascot-themed capiz shell merch, which the budding racketeer was unable to move after the tragic terror attack at the 1972 Munich Games.

The couple’s early years together were challenging. De Guia would spend the hours after midnight at the Munich Film Academy editing his first film while Katrin interrupted her studies to care for their firstborn, Kidlat, the family surviving on her social welfare benefits. But the two years of kapa-kapa—the process of groping and feeling that would come to define the Kidlat Tahimik way of doing things—paid off when the film Perfumed Nightmare made a huge splash at the 1977 Berlinale Forum, enchanting critics with its unexpected blend of innocence and cleverness. The film’s critique of Western capitalist culture and its affirmation of one’s innate ancestral powers planted the seed of what Tahimik would conceive of as the indio-genius sariling dwende, the liberating inner spirit who guides one toward truth and knowledge, unfettered and unburdened by the crust of colonialism.
The young family moved to the Philippines soon after, the filmmaker wanting their son to grow up in the embrace of kapwa culture, though he didn’t have the term for it then. It would take his German wife Katrin to hold up the mirror that would make him realize and appreciate the complexity and depth of the Filipino way of being.
Katrin was charmed by the Philippines and was warmly welcomed by her husband’s family, though at the start she could barely understand English, much less Filipino. Borrowing one of her husband’s Third World techniques, she decided to “make defect into effect” and ventured boldly into Filipino life, relying on non-verbal communication cues to navigate situations and swim rough tides that eventually pushed her into pursuing a degree in psychology at the University of the Philippines, when she was a mother of three in her late 30s.

In one of her classes Katrin came across the concept of kapwa in a paper written by Dr. Virgilio Enriquez, a Filipino psychologist who advocated for an indigenous psychology rooted in the heritage of Asian people. Suddenly, it all made sense to her; the quirks and idiosyncrasies of Pinoy behavior that were so unlike anything she encountered in Germany, from how Filipinos would always offer to share food or squeeze one more person into an overcrowded vehicle. Even the first EDSA revolution, where thousands massed on the streets to peacefully overthrow the government, was to Katrin a manifestation of kapwa on a grand scale.
December, Baguio. Kabunyan de Guia gives us a tour of the family’s dwelling place. Calling such an assemblage a house would be unjust, this patchwork of cottages rebuilt over the ruins of their former, typically shaped square house, which burned down in 2004. The melted foundations determined the new contours of the design and it was built organically, experimentally, without any blueprints. Kapa kapa. Burnt or bent, materials were salvaged and repurposed without the need to cover up their fiery transfiguration. Mosaic tilework intensified the warped walls and looping pathways. Tree trunks emerged as centerpiece installations, while tiny dwendes hid in plain sight. I feel both at home and disoriented. The shape of the structures follows principles of Steiner/Waldorf architecture, which abhors straight lines. The absence of right angles, perfectly even surfaces, and straightforward passages did everything in their power to confront your sense of balance and order.
Kidlat Tahimik appears out of nowhere (striking silently!) and tells us how their place was a product of “jamming with the cosmos.” Jamming with the cosmos is a groovy way of saying “Bathala Na.” In her book, Katrin describes Ba(t)hala Na as a mindset of improvisation and not fatalism, as interpreted by the Americans. “In the folds of unforeseeable events hide infinite opportunities,” she writes. “It recognizes that such situations can teach one to adapt and eventually turn unfortunate events into advantages, making defect into effect.”
While we wait for Dr. de Guia to be ready, Kabunyan quickly improvises a coffee table out of a rusted antique washing machine drum and a fresh slab of tile from his studio, fated to be shattered for one of his mosaics, but not just yet. Kabunyan is at the end of his eight-year sojourn in Davao, the genesis of which we saw in the film Lakaran. Now that his children are older, he has returned to the hearth, the home he helped his father piece together after the fire.

His mother was not around when their house and everything they owned went up in flames. She was in Manila, turning over the manuscript of her book that was two decades in the making. Kapwa, the Self in Other: Worldviews and Lifestyles of Filipino Culture-Bearers is a compendium of academic theory, artistic commentary, journal entries, and deeply personal reflections collected from the combined years of studying Sikolohiyang Pilipino under Dr. Enriquez, walking with culture bearers, and ultimately embodying her object of study: the indigenous philosophy of kapwa. A cosmic culmination of a life’s work, not destroyed, but purified in the fire.
It is now 20 years since Kapwa was published. In the diaspora, the active practice of kapwa is a thread that weaves Filipinos to their heritage. Before I read Katrin’s book, I only had a cursory understanding of what it meant: a shared identity, which I thought was akin to a brother/sisterhood. It is much more than that. In contrast to the Western individualism of “I” and “you,” kapwa is a relationality where the inner self encompasses the Other. I’m reminded of the Rastafarian term “I and I” which expresses the oneness between all people and the Divine, a worldview that also resists colonial narratives.

“When the Spanish landed in Limasawa, the natives welcomed them. They nurtured them. They gave food. The Spanish were dying of scurvy and starvation. But the Limasawans tended to them,” Tahimik says, explaining that their natural openness overrode whatever suspicions they had of the foreigners. “I think that’s what kapwa is about. This kapwa is part of the high water table of spirituality, which means we treat people as spiritual beings, akin to our spiritual selves.”
Tahimik (although he instructs us to call him Tatay) had just returned from Cebu, where he unveiled more pieces from his world-traveled exhibition Indio-Genius: 500 Taon ng Labanang Kultural (1521-2021) at the Mactan-Cebu International Airport, including a tribute to Lapu Lapu’s wife Bulakna, a babaylan warrior to whom Tahimik gave the poetic license of delivering the fatal blow against Magellan.
Kidlat and Katrin’s respective works are like warp and weft, each reinforcing the other and together weaving an intricate picture of Pagkataong Filipino. Kidlat’s kapa-kapa way of living intrigued his wife. Growing up in post-war Munich, Katrin was intellectually oriented toward phenomenology, analytical psychology, and existentialism, the theoretical frameworks she would eventually use to try and understand her host culture.
“This kapwa is part of the high water table of spirituality, which means we treat people as spiritual beings, akin to our spiritual selves.”
“She was trying to verbalize what it is about this culture that makes it gemütlich or maginhawa. She could feel it. By getting her PhD in Sikolohiyang Pilipino, she was able to come up with very explicit examples. And I benefited from it too,” Tatay says. “She’s very academic, and sometimes the layman finds it difficult to understand the jargon of academics but, as it was playing out in our family and our life with other artists or with other people, the tenets that were brought out by Dr. Ver Enriquez began to be more understandable to me. I could relate to a lot of them, as a filmmaker and an artist.”
Tahimik has never written a script, instead relying on pakikiramdam (knowing through feeling) to tell his story. He has chosen to remain an independent filmmaker, free of the exacting machinery involved in huge productions. “If my films are acclaimed abroad, it’s not because Kidlat Tahimik is a film genius or somebody who was making great innovations in storytelling,” he says. “I think it’s because I was going back to an old storyteller’s way, waiting for the right words or the right images to make the next block of the story. Maybe my inner dwende, with its kapwa culture, gave me a certain freedom that I didn’t have to compete with Hollywood filmmakers.”
Besides her husband, Katrin documented the lives of several culture-bearing artists who personified the different values associated with kapwa psychology. Roberto Villanueva, who tapped into ancestral wisdom through his shamanic ceremonial installation-performance pieces; the Filipino American artist and educator Angel Velasco Shaw, who found lakas ng loob (inner strength) in the lakas ng loob of Lucy Reyes, the famous faith healer and crucifixee; wandering performance artist Rene Aquitania, who walked the narrow path or katuwirang landas, often sleeping on the streets; Perry Argel, who achieves kabuohan (wholeness) through the practice of the Ritual of Daily Living.

For the task of chronicling their art-making processes, Katrin immersed herself in the lives of these artists, often living with them for a period, walking alongside them, barefoot if called for, over mountains and across rivers, sleeping on dirt floors or under the stars. It was immersive field work that defied all standards of objectivity; their art-as-lakaran became entwined with her lakaran-as-knowledge. Consumed with her studies at UP Diliman, Tahimik took on the role of family man. Home videos involving his children crept into his films. As he often tells the public, he is tatay first, and filmmaker second. And he never stopped shooting; over the years he has collected boxes and boxes, and now bytes and bytes of footage.
In the middle of her book, sandwiched between the chapters on culture bearers, Katrin turns her introspective eye on herself. In her quest to cross the threshold of consciousness and fully imbibe ancestral wisdom, she felt that she needed to go through painful initiation rituals that induced states of trance and healing. She had eight-pointed stars tattooed on the palms of her hands and the shape of a lizard and snake branded onto her skin, among other rites, some of which were self-administered. “Suffering, in ancestral Filipino custom, is never shunned or avoided,” she writes. “Rather it is recognized as a spiritual cleansing process… healing is breaking through a crust of fears.”
This section was surprisingly intense, and I was still trying to process it when Katrin finally admitted visitors to her room. I ask her if it is necessary for her, or for others, to go through that kind of pain.
“Pain for me was curiosity, because I didn’t believe that tattoos were only about social status, or like today, it’s all just decoration and expression of personal conflict,” she answers. “I believe, and that’s what I wanted to describe, how tattoos are actually a way of healing, to impart the body a sense of healing that it never forgets.”


De Guia is sitting up on the bed covered by a blanket, with her husband next to her. It’s an intimate moment with Tatay and Nanay that should feel intrusive, but the couple are as receiving and giving as ever, even as Mrs. de Guia struggles with COPD. She continues, “Around the world, tattoos are initiations given around early puberty. So I was curious, and I know that makes many people cringe, but I thought if you want to know anything, you have to be willing to also get hurt sometimes, because nothing is given on a silver platter. You have to earn it.”
Katrin de Guia has always considered herself somewhat of a rebel. Freedom is paramount, as it is to her husband. “I was an oddball in the academe,” she says, “but smart enough to defend my viewpoints, so that’s what I did with Enriquez’ theory, to find a way to show that he was right.” Over the years, she has lectured, organized Kapwa Conferences, and recently she has appeared on YouTube programs sharing her story with a new generation. “If I was a professor, I couldn’t do this. They would say, that’s not scientific.”
She reveals that she has a manuscript nearing completion, which her son Kawayan has been rallying for her to finish. We learn that it’s a sequel. “Kapwa, the Self in Other means people,” de Guia says, “but Kapwa, the Self in All means the animist self, the self in all, plants and animals and trees, mountains.” A thread of this belief can already be detected running throughout the first book, waiting to be unraveled. “Enriquez could not come out with something like that during his time. He would have been discredited right away, because animism had nothing to do with psychology. Now, 50 years later, it’s different. We forget that we are not the only ones on this planet. So the animist connection is moving into the focus of many people, especially younger people who inherit this planet.”
“I did not stay on track.
I strayed on track.”
Her affinity with the natural world and with the unseen was forged as a young child, long before she spent time with indigenous communities. Her family had a small weekend cottage along the lake where she and her brother were given the freedom to roam. One time, she realized she had gone deep in the forest and couldn’t find her way back, a scene straight out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. “And so I cried and cried and cried, and then I fell asleep on the moss,” she recounts. “And when I woke up, I saw suddenly little sparks of light on the trees, going from one tree to the other, like, here’s the way. So I followed it, and in five minutes, I was out of the forest and I could find my way home. It was an experience I never forgot.”
The husband interjects with how impressed he was when he first met her. “She could walk barefoot, even over stones. Me, I was born in this part of the world but I don’t have the soles for that,” he says. “It shows her connection with nature.”

Tahimik credits his wife for opening his eyes to the nuances of Filipino personhood, the things he had taken for granted. “I knew it was much easier for Filipinos to accommodate others, but I could not understand why. I’ve been experiencing it all my life, but because Katrin went through this whole protocol as an academic, I began to understand, and it was a mirror to me.” This, in turn, set him on a course that kept kapwa as his compass. “I did not stay on track. I strayed on track. Nagkapa-kapa. I found my way to where this is.” He turns to face his partner of 50 years. “Thank you for being so diligent with your PhD.”
“I’m just here to learn. Humanity is just here to learn,” Katrin says. Her awareness has only heightened as she nears what she calls the cocooning process. As an artist, a scholar, and a writer, her astounding sensitivity and openness to the universe has allowed her to see beyond what the rational mind sees. Hovering between the mystical and the visionary, her depth of perception is what makes Kapwa, the Self in Other more than just an explication of Enriquez’ ideas but a celebration of Filipino culture-bearers whose art has often eluded or been ignored by Western critics. Her next book will push further that which we cannot put in words, but in our core could feel and know about the self in everyone, everything, all at once.
Kapwa is both the umbilical cord that pulls Filipinos back home, and the anchor which lets them set sail in foreign lands. From her first contact, de Guia always thought of Filipinos as wonderfully open people, a belief confirmed through extensive analysis, living and playing with Filipinos in the mountains of Baguio and beyond. “Filipinos are lucky to come from an ancient culture of seafarers, of explorers. They are happy people, laughing people, because they share the generous porosity that they experience from nature with others everywhere,” she says. “And I just hope that nobody forgets this.”
Photographs by JL JAVIER. Art Director: Jann Pascua. Producer: Bianca Zaragoza. Talent Coordinator: Patricia Villoria. Photographer’s Assistant: Geric Cruz.