Joshua Serafin Cosmological Gangbang: Creation Paradigm (Excerpt), 2023
Film Installation
9 min, 41 seconds
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 video installation Creation Paradigm (excerpt) 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.
Concept: Joshua Serafin
Performers: Bunny Cadag, Lukresia Quismundo, John Nofiel
Filmmaking team: Brandon Louis Relucio and Davide Belotti
Colorist and Editor: Brandon Relucio
Assistant Camera: James Trinidad
Production Manager: Niieldg Aquino
Overall Assistance: Nash Kepler Balagso
Sound Design: Alex Zhang Hungtai
Residency: Bellas Artes Projects , Jam Acuzar
Joshua Serafin is a multi-disciplinary artist who combines dance, performance, visual arts, and choreography. Born in the Philippines, they are currently based in Brussels. They are also a house artist of Viernulvier from season 2023-2027. They are trained in dance in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and PARTS in Brussels. They also have finished their bachelor’s and master’s in Visual Arts in Fine arts in KASK in Ghent. 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 creates new forms of rituals, and embodiment, based on queer ecologies. Serafin’s work as a maker, performer, 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 of Filipino identity with hybridity of the western ideologies; unpacking the historical violence of its feudal contemporary society and its dehumanising normality. They participated in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Their work VOID video installation, VOID live performance and PEARLS were part of Foreigners Everywhere.