Void

Void is a work by Joshua Serafin in which we see the creation or birth of a god(dess) for the future. This god, Void, needs to live in the mortal world to better understand what it means to be a god(dess) of this time. Void’s choreographic movements embody the sadness, pain and grief of our current society.

Void gathers all the sadness, all the memories of hurt and longing, and turns them into pearls to keep in the astral realm, where the memories are kept for the gods to learn and archive humanity’s pain. When everyone is asleep, Void takes in all universal pain; when humanity  awakes, their sadness feels lighter.

The live performance of Void is a physical manifestation coming from the video work. It is the 2nd iteration of a bigger cosmology of work titled “Cosmological Gangbang”. This piece is a conversation with live musician and a prerecorded soundscape. In the performance, we see Void on an island installation blending into its environment. Two light pillars that extend to the sky create a portal that connects the spirit and mortal realms. Void converses to the soundscape, the ecological and meta-realm landscape surrounding it. Its dance creates a ritual of birth, and rebirth, collecting global sadness and its beauty. An embodiment of our current society. In this performance we see an excerpt of the film “Creation Paradigm” where it narrates the origin of Void.

“Through the language of dance and choreography, Void (25’) by Joshua Serafin narrates the creation of a new God, the birth of a futuristic deity. Serafin’s research into the making of this piece is centered around creation myth stories of pre-colonial animistic religions from the Philippines, which were suppressed by the Spanish imposition of Catholicism. Through movement, the materiality of their bodily presence and the accompanying sci-fi soundtrack, this work proposes the foundation of a queer mythology; the nascent moment of a ‘queer spiritual force’ coming out of an apocalyptic era, perhaps our current one, that has arrived to refund a new kind of humanity. Void, this speculative new God, appears on earth to live in the mortal world to better understand what it means to be a god of a new time. In the words of the artist, the impetus for creating this work is to decolonize the self and to question heteronormative ideologies that were implemented in the Philippines and across the world by the west through religion. It takes as a starting point the Filipino pre-colonial identity which is fluid and doesn’t conform to binary representation, as is the case in many other pre-colonial societies.“
– Inti Atawallpa Guerrero