BERLIN — Artist Joshua Serafin is birthing a pantheon of gods embodying the power of pre-colonial, gender-nonconforming identities. From Adriano Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale to Berlin’s House of World Cultures and New York’s Amant Art, the Filipino-born, Brussels-based artist’s performances and video installations have been challenging viewers — and institutions — to confront violence against trans people of color. Works in their series Cosmological Gangbang (2020–ongoing), currently on tour, implore us to locate what the artist names as “spirit” within and around ourselves — a spirit that, for many of us, has been dislodged by the violence of colonization. For the artist, this impetus to reconnect with home, gender, and our unconscious shadow entails a pertinent process of healing, both individually and in concert with trans kin.
Serafin began their practice with drawing during their formative years growing up in the Philippines, and went on to find their footing in ballet and contemporary dance while at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Their first solo piece of choreography, “MISS” (2021), created after moving to Belgium for their bachelor’s degree at the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios, interrogated the performativity of gender within the subculture of transgender beauty pageants in the Philippines. That milieu, Serafin told Hyperallergic in a video call, is one in which “queerness explodes any fixed categorization of femininity and fantasy.”
Cosmological Gangbang (2020–2024) originated soon thereafter, sprouting from the artist’s desire to orient their practice toward abstraction. The three-part series, composed of Timawo, Creation Paradigm, and PEARLS, has been the focus of their practice over the last four years. The aesthetics of the multi-form trilogy comprising video, performance, drawing, and painting is rooted in an early fascination with fantastical worlds, straddling the realm of spirits with the arena of video games.
“I’ve always been drawn to the femme characters such as the siren or vixen,” said Serafin. “It’s empowering to be a character that can kick ass, as opposed to the misogynistic view of women.” The trilogy centers 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 in part two of the trilogy, creates the most explosive imprint among the components of Cosmological Gangbang. For this work that exists as both live performance and video installation, 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 explained.
With the protection of spirit guides that they seem to call on through an array of nude withering gestures, their shadow is invited to come out of the darkness and claim center stage as they plunge into a pool of black slime. The visual language, Serafin expanded, further draws from the hedonistic energy of “darkrooms, club floors, the carnality that we lean into to deal with the pressure of queer life.”
While “VOID” created a space to look inward, Serafin sought to open an invitation to a collective of trans people with the other iterations. The three-channel video “Creation Paradigm” (2023) straddles inward and outward manifestations of spirit work. In devising the piece, Serafin asked performers Bunny Cadag, Lukresia Quismundo, and Alaga to envision their embodiment as a divine entity. Within a crescendo of elemental rituals, the video locates possibilities of trans joy not only in an optimistic future, but also in pre-colonial pasts where trans and nonbinary people were celebrated as channels of divinity.
The performance PEARLS (2024), the most recent chapter of Cosmological Gangbang, builds on the camaraderie developed between Serafin, Cadag, and Quismundo during the making of Creation Paradigm. Having gradually built trust, Serafin explained, “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.”
While doing research into indigenous Filipino mythologies between 2021 and 2023, Serafin heard from an academic that it is impossible to retrieve the core of Indigenous knowledge after its contamination by the colonial gaze. However, on a trip into the Mindanao mountains in the northern Philippines while developing PEARLS, they encountered the Manobo-Talaandig community. Here, they found the stories vividly alive, preserved in the oral traditions of the people.
“It was important for us to not go there and just take the stories to put into the show,” Serafin said. “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.”
Anchoring itself at the outset in an emotional ballad of survival written by Jaya Jacobo and magnanimously sung by Bunny Cadag, PEARLS moves swiftly yet tenderly between multiple segments. The performers break the fourth wall midway into the first act, challenging audiences to confront the fetishization and seclusions that colonialism has enacted on trans communities in the Philippines.
The second act of PEARLS features 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 many years in a way that allows them to skilfully wield it — is a highlight of the trilogy. The “primordial mud,” as the artist calls it, becomes the non-human fourth character that binds the performance together. Jubilantly spinning the slime in their hands before launching it up in the air, playfully throwing at one another, the performers reclaim the stage as a sanctuary outside the horrors of cis-patriarchal society.
Perhaps the most evocative line from PEARLS is a question 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 practice at large. Always experimenting, the artist is now working on a series of paintings created with the primordial mud they have developed. “I’m fascinated with this phantom architecture that transforms with time, growing and decaying as it likes,” Serafin said. In each ethereal iteration of the series so far, the artist has opened up possibilities to examine such transformations — of shadow, of collectivity, of beyond-human camaraderie, tenderly revealing glimmers of a path to mend obstinate ruptures between self and other, spirit and body.
