As it turns out, there is more than one kind of gangbang. There’s the type we know, where the fumes of desire power pelvic congregations, and then there are the ceremonies built by Joshua Serafin that run away before language can hold them down. Are they bacchanalia of de-creation? Excisions of the human, in the recognition that humanization itself is an ugly playpen? Or maybe they’re riots against the body as we know it—elbow, neck, fingernail, chin—toward flesh as a force of matter that matters?
The artist Joshua Serafin makes their US debut this summer at Amant in New York, presenting two parts of an ongoing series titled “Cosmological Gangbang.” The three-channel video Creation Paradigm (2023), screening at Amant’s 932 Grand Street location from June 27 to August 18, 2024, reenvisions Filipino creation myths through a matrix of genderqueerness. The live performance VOID (2023), Serafin’s signature piece, comes to an abandoned East Williamsburg lot on July 20 direct from the sixtieth edition of the Venice Biennale.
Serafin’s work marries precolonial Indigenous ritual with the steroidally violent beauty of a video game metaverse. When they dance, their arms beat the ground with Richter-scale force, and their body glitches like a Jersey club beat. In VOID, the artist works with a substance they call primordial mud, which subsumes Serafin so wholly as to birth new definitions of what the body can hold and set in motion. They’re tearing at the flimsy walls of representation, and spinning toward the promise of anarchic, porous, vibratory life.
Before they flew to New York, I caught up with Serafin on a Tuesday morning.
VOID AND CREATION PARADIGM belong to a whole cosmology of work that I’ve made. VOID started as a video and later became a live performance. Creation Paradigm is coming out only now, but actually it’s the backstory to VOID and we filmed it first. I like this feeling of going back into a work—separating from a linear narrative trajectory.
The series is called “Cosmological Gangbang.” I work with a serial structure because it gives me time to articulate a certain idea. In “Cosmological Gangbang,” we’re trying to rewrite history by speculating on existent happenings or cultures that the Philippines already carries, particularly within precolonial history.
The word “gangbang” was inspired by the idea of different cosmological powers or deities gathering in one place. I wanted to shift away from the violence of the term, and towards the idea of a gathering for queer procreation. What if a gangbang could just be different kinds of forces, different kinds of beauty, arriving in one world? I don’t relate to procreation as a system of human biological reproduction. I see it as a gathering which aims to materialize another world. Can we procreate a new way of being, of relating to each other?
I like to start small. Sketches, paintings, and two-dimensional objects morph into moving-image works, which eventually become live performances. I trained intensively in different mediums to arrive at this multidisciplinary functioning. After training in theater for five years, I studied dance for nearly fifteen. When I graduated with a degree in contemporary dance, I felt that I only knew how to materialize an idea through an embodied state. I needed to stop the body in order to understand other modalities of making; to externalize my process of creation. So I did a master’s in fine arts, to articulate and understand materiality.
It took a year and a half to find the right consistency, elements, and conditions to create the primordial mud we use in VOID. Dancing with the primordial mud creates a kind of phantomness, because it arrives as a form and dissolves in the same second. I disappear into these ephemeral sculptures to become an ever-changing body, an entity of liquidity. Gravity allows no other way.
I grew up in a one-god household. My family is Christian, but at the same time, my mom is very superstitious, and generally in the Philippines we believe in many spirits and demons. When I went to high school, I discovered Buddhism and different pantheons of religion. I also play video games. Basically, I’m a geek. I think that’s where the mythological aspect of my work comes from.
The first piece I made, MISS (2017), was about beauty pageants in the Philippines. I was in six-inch heels, almost naked, performing in Western Europe. I questioned representation by subjecting myself to all the mechanisms of exoticism. Coming off MISS, when I began to listen to the world of “Cosmological Gangbang,” I realized the main character was actually the void. So I diminished the volume of my selfhood to figure the body as a global landscape. VOID begins with this ethnographic video situated in the Philippines, and then I come naked into this liquidity and diminish all of that. Because of the way I am enfolded by the materials, you can’t really see me, so you’re forced to see beyond my identity and into a field of body-material. I resist being framed in one specific way. How can we read a work beyond the violence of its identitarian histories? VOID resists the act of framing by becoming everything and nothing at the same time.
– As told to Amit Noy
