BERLIN — Artist Joshua Serafin is birthing a pantheon of gods embodying the ability of pre-colonial, gender-nonconforming identities. From Adriano Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale to Berlin’s Home of World Cultures and New York’s Amant Artwork, the Filipino-born, Brussels-based artist’s performances and video installations have been difficult viewers — and establishments — to confront violence in opposition to trans individuals of coloration. Works of their sequence Cosmological Gangbang (2020–ongoing), at the moment 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 dwelling, gender, and our unconscious shadow entails a pertinent means of therapeutic, each individually and in live performance with trans kin.
Serafin started their observe with drawing throughout their youth rising up within the Philippines, and went on to search out their footing in ballet and up to date 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 throughout the subculture of transgender magnificence pageants within the Philippines. That milieu, Serafin informed Hyperallergic in a video name, is one through which “queerness explodes any fastened categorization of femininity and fantasy.”
Cosmological Gangbang (2020–2024) originated quickly thereafter, sprouting from the artist’s need 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 at all times been drawn to the femme characters such because the siren or vixen,” mentioned Serafin. “It’s empowering to be a personality that may kick ass, versus the misogynistic view of girls.” The trilogy facilities visages of emboldened femininity from these chimeric worlds, forming a nonlinear narrative of journeys channeling ancestral divinity.
The auto-narrative, introspective nature of “VOID” (2022), developed partially two of the trilogy, creates essentially the most explosive imprint among the many parts of Cosmological Gangbang. For this work that exists as each dwell efficiency and video set up, the artist delves into the recesses of their psyche to lure out suppressed demons.
“VOID is a personality that I created to assist me survive the ache of leaving dwelling early, the various histories of violence one carries dwelling as a queer-trans particular person, to permit me to articulate these experiences as a manner in direction of therapeutic,” Serafin defined.
With the safety of spirit guides that they appear to name on by an array of nude withering gestures, their shadow is invited to return out of the darkness and declare heart stage as they plunge right into a pool of black slime. The visible language, Serafin expanded, additional attracts from the hedonistic vitality of “darkrooms, membership flooring, the carnality that we lean into to cope with the strain of queer life.”
Whereas “VOID” created an area to look inward, Serafin sought to open an invite to a collective of trans individuals 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 examine 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 individuals have been celebrated as channels of divinity.
The efficiency PEARLS (2024), the latest chapter of Cosmological Gangbang, builds on the camaraderie developed between Serafin, Cadag, and Quismundo throughout the making of Creation Paradigm. Having regularly constructed belief, Serafin defined, “The pearl is the connection between the collaborators, however it’s also taking again house for our tales, getting trans our bodies visas to journey, sensitizing establishments … that is all very a lot a part of the work.”
Whereas doing analysis into indigenous Filipino mythologies between 2021 and 2023, Serafin heard from a tutorial that it’s inconceivable to retrieve the core of Indigenous data after its contamination by the colonial gaze. Nonetheless, on a visit into the Mindanao mountains within the northern Philippines whereas creating PEARLS, they encountered the Manobo-Talaandig group. Right here, they discovered the tales vividly alive, preserved within the oral traditions of the individuals.
“It was vital for us to not go there and simply take the tales to place into the present,” Serafin mentioned. “It felt disrespectful and extractivist. As a substitute, we selected to interpret these articulations of interconnectedness in our personal methods and carry the thickness of that have into the efficiency.”
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 includes 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 manner that enables 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: “Are you aware how painful it’s for the spirit to detach itself from the physique?” The inquiry underlines Serafin’s observe at massive. At all times 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 structure that transforms with time, rising and decaying because it likes,” Serafin mentioned. In every ethereal iteration of the sequence to this point, 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.