Joshua Serafin’s “Cosmological Gangbang” (2023) is an ongoing project spanning painting, drawing, film collage, video installation, and live performance. Drawing on the precolonial history and creation myths of the Philippine archipelago, the project imagines a pantheon of non-binary and gender-fluid deities who transgress both the bounds of earthly history and binary categories of identity. “Cosmological Gangbang” imagines a speculative future where the imposed ideologies of colonial patriarchy have given way to more ancient, more fluid, and more liberated modes of being.

The three-channel video installation Creation Paradigm is “Cosmological Gangbang’s” second iteration. The film follows three divinities from different worlds who represent different facets of being: Uling, light and dark; Talu, the reflection of oneself; and Waling-Waling, the euphoria of love (played by the artist’s collaborators Bunny Cadag; Lukresia Quismundo, aka thirdworld bb; and John Chesleigh Nofiel, aka Alaga) across a series of dreamlike vignettes. Encounters with long-lost ancestral environments build, at the film’s climax, to a communion mediated by a black liquid that suggests both primordial ooze and a balm for healing the collective trauma of colonization. With its dislocated sense of time and place, Creation Paradigm proposes that the liberation of all bodies does not only exist in a hypothetical future; instead, it is deeply rooted in precolonial modes of thought and categories of identification. Creating a loop between past and future, the film viscerally argues for in-betweenness and decolonization as mutual and complimentary necessities.

Creation Paradigm’s imagery relates to Joshua’s performance work VOID, which will be presented on July 20, 2024 at Amant’s outdoor space at 316 Ten Eyck. The performance is free and open to the public, with RSVPs encouraged.

Joshua Serafin (they/she) is a multi-disciplinary artist who combines dance, performance, visual arts, and choreography. Born in the Philippines in 1995, they are currently based in Brussels. They are a house artist of Viernulvier for the season 2023-2027. They studied contemporary dance at Hong Kong Academy and later on graduated from P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. Joshua received a Bachelor’s in Performance in 2021 and a Master’s in Fine Arts in 2022 from KASK, where they were the recipient of the Horlait-Dapsens Prize. They premiered their first solo work “Miss” in VIERNULVIER and have since collaborated with multiple artists in Asia and Europe. Their work has been shown internationally, most notably in Esplanade in Singapore, BIT Teatergarasjen, Norway; Anti Festival, Finland; Nightshift, Ostende; Beursschowburg, Brussels; Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; TONO Festival, Mexico City; and Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin. They were an official participant in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

Joshua’s artistic process is an intense sociological exorcism of Filipino identity about global ideologies and contemporary phenomena, unpacking the historical violence of its feudal contemporary society and its dehumanizing normality. Joshua’s globally acclaimed performance is committed to dwelling within interstitial spaces, a refusal to participate in dimorphic structures so they can craft an idiom where they can speak from in-betweenness and translate ideas of alterity into forms of speculation.