Bhenji Ra is an Australian Filipina artist working at the intersections of dance, video and community activation. Rooted in trans-intercultural and intergenerational practice, her work deals with the unseen narratives of society seeking to offer new, decolonial, and fugitive possibilities of community and becoming. Guided by her genealogies, both queer and cultural, she weaves together vast tapestries of ritual, archive and collective action that draw upon the intersections and intimacies of her life.

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
Trans-Root (2024) conjures years of personal footage from existing / dancing / sister-hooding on the margins. These recordings that are inalienable to my vision of a future mapped towards horizons of liberation. Sparked by multiple modes of physical intonation, the final video is my way of gathering these bodily memories that I’ve shared with sisters in our diverse journeys  that gesture towards past and future visions of transfeminine freedom. Bodies, borders and mythology collapse into each other in a rapture of fugitive co-emergence and collaborative collision. We imagine this through “trans root” systems that manifest into a singular assemblage of riotous “doll” choreography that dreams of unleashing onto the Empire and its concurrent systems of control and violence. The figure of the trickster, born from this chimera of accumulated memory, glistens on the horizon, gesturing towards a future unbound by a binarized imagination.

This new work speaks directly to the manifesto of Circa 2024, dwelling in the paradoxes of finding a passage of freedom between ground and flight and imagining creativity to offer paradigms of living in the world otherwise.

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
With the prize money, I plan to make a short film titled No New Gods (no icons, no legends, no gurus, no solo geniuses, no saviors, no one off wonders, no one narrative). This work is imagined from the perspective of the fantastical dimension of Philippines flora, fauna and the creatures that witness the fall of an empire—moments before and after an eclipse. Within this world, a manifesto is born, calling on the epic narratives of the Philippine archipelago and its transfeminine guardians as a framework to lead us through climate and capitalist catastrophe.

In keeping with the manifesto of CIRCA 2024 of breaking free into infinity, I envision further developing a decolonial choreography through the many examples that are shown and what I glimpsed while making Trans-Root. The prize will fund the logistics of a cinematic production of this short film guided by my overarching vision of movement between riot and ceremony.

FOLLOW BHENJI RA ON INSTAGRAM