BERLIN — Artist Joshua Serafin is birthing a pantheon of gods embodying the facility of pre-colonial, gender-nonconforming identities. From Adriano Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale to Berlin’s Home of World Cultures and New York’s Amant, the Filipino-born, Brussels-based artist’s performances and video installations have been difficult viewers — and establishments — to confront violence in opposition to trans folks of colour. Works of their sequence Cosmological Gangbang (2020–ongoing), presently on tour, implore us to find what the artist names as “spirit” inside and round ourselves — a spirit that, for many people, has been dislodged by the violence of colonization. For the artist, this impetus to reconnect with residence, gender, and our unconscious shadow entails a pertinent strategy of therapeutic, each individually and in live performance with trans kin.
Serafin started their observe with drawing throughout their adolescence rising up within the Philippines, and went on to seek out their footing in ballet and modern dance whereas on the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Their first solo piece of choreography, “MISS” (2021), created after transferring to Belgium for his or her bachelor’s diploma on the Performing Arts Analysis and Coaching Studios, interrogated the performativity of gender inside the subculture of transgender magnificence pageants within the Philippines. That milieu, Serafin advised Hyperallergic in a video name, is one during which “queerness explodes any fixed categorization of femininity and fantasy.”
Cosmological Gangbang (2020–2024) originated quickly thereafter, sprouting from the artist’s want to orient their observe towards abstraction. The three-part sequence, composed of Timawo, Creation Paradigm, and PEARLS, has been the main target of their observe over the past 4 years. The aesthetics of the multi-form trilogy comprising video, efficiency, drawing, and portray is rooted in an early fascination with fantastical worlds, straddling the realm of spirits with the world of video video games.
“I’ve always been drawn to the femme characters such as the siren or vixen,” mentioned Serafin. “It’s empowering to be a character that can kick ass, as opposed to the misogynistic view of women.” The trilogy facilities visages of emboldened femininity from these chimeric worlds, forming a nonlinear narrative of journeys channeling ancestral divinity.
Joshua Serafin’s “VOID” carried out at Donau Pageant, Austria, in April 2024 (photograph by David Visnjic, courtesy Donaufestival)
The auto-narrative, introspective nature of “VOID” (2022), developed partly two of the trilogy, creates essentially the most explosive imprint among the many elements of Cosmological Gangbang. For this work that exists as each stay efficiency and video set up, the artist delves into the recesses of their psyche to lure out suppressed demons.
“VOID is a character that I created to help me survive the pain of leaving home early, the many histories of violence one carries living as a queer-trans person, to allow me to articulate these experiences as a way towards healing,” Serafin defined.
With the safety of spirit guides that they appear to name on by way of an array of nude withering gestures, their shadow is invited to return out of the darkness and declare middle stage as they plunge right into a pool of black slime. The visible language, Serafin expanded, additional attracts from the hedonistic power of “darkrooms, club floors, the carnality that we lean into to deal with the pressure of queer life.”
Whereas “VOID” created an area to look inward, Serafin sought to open an invite to a collective of trans folks with the opposite iterations. The three-channel video “Creation Paradigm” (2023) straddles inward and outward manifestations of spirit work. In devising the piece, Serafin requested performers Bunny Cadag, Lukresia Quismundo, and Alaga to ascertain their embodiment as a divine entity. Inside a crescendo of elemental rituals, the video locates potentialities of trans pleasure not solely in an optimistic future, but in addition in pre-colonial pasts the place trans and nonbinary folks had been celebrated as channels of divinity.
Set up view of Joshua Serafin’s “Creation Paradigm” (2024), video, 25 minutes loop, at Amant in Brooklyn (photograph courtesy New Doc, courtesy Amant)
The efficiency PEARLS (2024), the latest chapter of Cosmological Gangbang, builds on the camaraderie developed between Serafin, Cadag, and Quismundo in the course of the making of Creation Paradigm. Having regularly constructed belief, Serafin defined, “The pearl is the relationship between the collaborators, but it is also taking back space for our stories, getting trans bodies visas to travel, sensitizing institutions … this is all very much part of the work.”
Whereas doing analysis into indigenous Filipino mythologies between 2021 and 2023, Serafin heard from an educational that it’s inconceivable to retrieve the core of Indigenous information after its contamination by the colonial gaze. Nonetheless, on a visit into the Mindanao mountains within the northern Philippines whereas growing PEARLS, they encountered the Manobo-Talaandig group. Right here, they discovered the tales vividly alive, preserved within the oral traditions of the folks.
“It was important for us to not go there and just take the stories to put into the show,” Serafin mentioned. “It felt disrespectful and extractivist. Instead, we chose to interpret those articulations of interconnectedness in our own ways and carry the thickness of that experience into the performance.”
Joshua Serafin, Pearls carried out at Esplanade theater on the Bay, Singapore, da:ns focus – Join Asia Now (CAN), in October 2024 (photograph courtesy Esplanade)
Anchoring itself on the outset in an emotional ballad of survival written by Jaya Jacobo and magnanimously sung by Bunny Cadag, PEARLS strikes swiftly but tenderly between a number of segments. The performers break the fourth wall halfway into the primary act, difficult audiences to confront the fetishization and seclusions that colonialism has enacted on trans communities within the Philippines.
The second act of PEARLS encompasses a glowing pupa suspended over the stage coming to life, pouring a stream of ethereal flesh-hued slime onto a triangular base. This slime — crafted and refined by Serafin over a few years in a approach that permits them to skilfully wield it — is a spotlight of the trilogy. The “primordial mud,” because the artist calls it, turns into the non-human fourth character that binds the efficiency collectively. Jubilantly spinning the slime of their palms earlier than launching it up within the air, playfully throwing at each other, the performers reclaim the stage as a sanctuary outdoors the horrors of cis-patriarchal society.
Maybe essentially the most evocative line from PEARLS is a query posed to the viewer: “Do you know how painful it is for the spirit to detach itself from the body?” The inquiry underlines Serafin’s observe at massive. All the time experimenting, the artist is now engaged on a sequence of work created with the primordial mud they’ve developed. “I’m fascinated with this phantom architecture that transforms with time, growing and decaying as it likes,” Serafin mentioned. In every ethereal iteration of the sequence up to now, the artist has opened up potentialities to look at such transformations — of shadow, of collectivity, of beyond-human camaraderie, tenderly revealing glimmers of a path to fix obstinate ruptures between self and different, spirit and physique.
