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.

Exploring themes of transmigration and queer politics, Joshua centers their practice on Otherness, aiming to translate ideas of alterity and otherworldly narratives into embodied performance and forms of speculation. Their series “Cosmological Gangbang” is the result of their most recent artistic research, having unfolded in several iterations across different media, namely: Timawo, Creation Paradigm, VOID, and PEARLS.

Serafin’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. Enfolding these sites of creation into queer + trans methodologies intuited from within tropical myth but also inspired by the dreamwork of a nonbinary cosmopolis populated by figures emancipated from colonial gender and embodied by turns in diverse states of solemnity and play. 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 the said in-betweenness.

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
I have been developing the series “Cosmological Gangbang”, which includes the works Creation Paradigm and VOID. The work hopes to rewrite history by speculating about a possible future. A future that is based on the pre-colonial Philippines and its indigenous ideologies, in which the idea of the binary was not as present, as opposed to the current world order. This series hopes to propose a way of liberating ourselves from this reign of the binary.

I found it very powerful to read the manifesto, to see the similarities between the text of Yves Klein and my own work. My own performance also dives deeper into the ideas proposed in his text and is even called VOID. This work dives into darkness, absence, emptiness, and the unknown. But in the midst of this all, it proposes a birth. A birthing of new worlds, ideologies, and states of in-betweenness. From the source, from the stems of ancestral and spiritual powers, VOID proposes a new world; embodied by beings that are queerly post-human

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
In Lost Ancestors, we further dive into the world of VOID where we observe humanity in a different form, one where it transforms itself into distinct deities that narrate and chant to each other about the current world order as well as its prophecies. There is a desire to develop this fantasy world based on factual anthropological research, disguised as metaphysical world-making. I attempt to (re)search (for) this past. An ancestral, precolonial body, a spiritual self and connection to body.

FOLLOW JOSHUA ANTIPORDA SERAFIN ON INSTAGRAM