“Joshua Serafin’s Tribute to Gender Nonconformity: A Living Shrine”
### Joshua Serafin: Reimagining Trans Divinity through Art, Performance, and Healing
In the global art world, discussions on gender nonconformity, colonial violence, and trans identity are often silenced or tokenized. However, Filipino-born, Brussels-based artist Joshua Serafin has been revolutionizing the conversation with their daring and evocative performances and installations. From Adriano Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale to storied spaces like New York’s Amant Art and Berlin’s House of World Cultures, Serafin’s art confronts systemic violence faced by trans people of color, while reclaiming pre-colonial identities once revered for their spiritual significance.
Their art is a bold reminder of the historical erasure that colonialism has wrought, and a testament to the power of art to heal these deep-seated traumas, both collective and personal. Central to their major ongoing project, **_Cosmological Gangbang_** (2020–2024), is a dialogue between past, present, and future, weaving a tapestry that centers on trans joy, ancestral divinity, and the embodiment of feminity as a reclaiming of power.
### From Ballet to Conceptual Art: A Journey into Abstraction
Serafin’s artistic journey is anything but linear. Born in the Philippines, they discovered their first love in drawing but soon embraced the rigors of ballet and contemporary dance, training at the prestigious Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Over time, their personal and artistic exploration led them to delve into gender performativity, notably with their solo choreography piece, **_MISS_** (2021), which explored the explosive queerness within the subculture of transgender beauty pageants in the Philippines. These early formative experiences became a springboard toward their current multidisciplinary practice, which blends video, performance, drawing, painting, and installation.
Serafin’s desire to break away from conventional forms crystallized in their shift toward abstraction, made evident in the multi-part series, **_Cosmological Gangbang_**. The trilogy, which includes **_Timawo_** (2020), **_Creation Paradigm_** (2023), and **_PEARLS_** (2024), serves as a canvas for Serafin to investigate the power of spirit, gender, and self-reclamation. Each piece in the series challenges the viewer to confront the ongoing colonial violence while inviting them into a space that seeks collective healing through journeys of self-awareness and rediscovery.
### **“VOID”: The Exposed Shadows of Psyche**
Among the works in the **_Cosmological Gangbang_** series, **_VOID_** (2022) stands out for its introspective and deeply personal nature. Presented as both a live performance and video installation, this piece delves into the realm of suppressed emotions, confronting the shadows that inhabit the psyche. Serafin uses performative nudity and an array of transformative gestures to express the vulnerability they faced growing up queer in a world that often deemed them “other.”
In **_VOID_**, Serafin becomes their own spirit guide, seeking the protection of ancestral divinity to confront their pain. The visceral image of them diving into a pool of black slime ties the visual intensity to the hedonistic energy of queer clubs and dark room spaces, revealing how often queer joy and safety are pursued in carnality and escapism.
### **Transcendence through Community: Circling Back to Ancestral Divinity**
While **_VOID_** explores the inward journey, the other works in Serafin’s **_Cosmological Gangbang_** shift toward collective healing. The next iteration, **_Creation Paradigm_** (2023), envisions trans bodies as divine entities, tracing roots back to times when transgender and nonbinary individuals were seen as mediums of spiritual transcendence in pre-colonial societies.
Serafin collaborated with multiple trans performers, asking each to reimagine their embodiment as a celebration of their gender complexity. In this three-channel video, trans joy takes center stage, unfolding through elemental rituals that honor both the future and past. By drawing from indigenous knowledge systems that honored gender fluidity, the work seeks to overthrow the rigid gender binaries imposed by colonialism, affirming the sacredness of a world where queerness is not demonized but sanctified.
### **The Power of Collaboration: PEARLS and Beyond**
Serafin’s latest work, **_PEARLS_** (2024), developed in tandem with their collaborators Bunny Cadag and Lukresia Quismundo, extends further into collective reimagination. While developing this performance, they spent time with the indigenous Manobo-Talaandig community in Mindanao, the Philippines. Here, Serafin learned that despite years of colonial intervention, pre-colonial Filipino mythologies have not been entirely lost but persist in oral traditions shared across generations.
However, rather than placing these stories directly into their art