Void

2022 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
10:34 minutes (looped)

Through the language of dance and choreography, Void by Joshua Serafin narrates the creation of a new God, the birth of a futuristic deity. Serafin’s research into the making of this dance video is centered around creation myth stories of pre-colonial animistic religions from the Philippines, which were suppressed by the Spanish imposition of Catholicism. Through movement, the materiality of his bodily presence on the screen, and the accompanying sci-fi soundtrack, this work proposes the foundation of a queer mythology; the nascent moment of a ‘queer spiritual force’ coming out of an apocalyptic era, perhaps our current one, that has arrived to refund a new kind of humanity. Void, this speculative new God, appears on earth to live in the mortal world to better understand what it means to be a god of a new time. In the words of the artist, the impetus for creating this work is to decolonize the self and to question heteronormative ideologies that were implemented in the Philippines and across the world by the west through religion. It takes as a starting point the Filipino pre-colonial identity which is fluid and doesn’t conform to binary representation, as is the case in many other pre-colonial societies. The main inspiration of this work is referencing spiritual backgrounds in Philippine society, and pre-colonial gender belief systems passed down through generational oral knowledge.

Joshua Serafin is trained in dance in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Brussels. Their works deal with questions about identity, transmigration, queer politics and representation, states of being, and ways of inhabiting the body. Their cosmology of works create new forms of rituals, and embodiment, based on queer ecologies. Serafin’s work as choreographer and dancer have been recently internationally acclaimed as they actively show and tour their work across the contemporary art scenes of Europe, and in festivals in East-Asia. Whether performing on stage, inside the museum, or through video and photography, Serafin’s artistic process is an intense sociological exorcism to Filipino identity; unpacking the historical violence of its feudal contemporary society and its dehumanising normality.

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