Sam Cottington—First off, How do you feel?

Joshua Serafin—I feel great. I’m back home in the Philippines. It was a crazy year, I’m just trying to process everything that has happened. Works I’d been preparing premiered, I toured 15 cities, did 30 shows, and everything just exploded in a very beautiful way but, then I burned out, of course.

Since I’ve been home I’ve been taking a lot of time to heal and really come back to my body: mentally, physically, and spiritually. I’m spending time with friends, seeing shamans, going surfing, and watching sunsets. It’s really grounding for me to be here and start thinking about what’s to come, and how to prepare for the future.

It makes sense that you got burned out, performance can be so intense for both artists and audiences. How do you manage that intensity?

It’s true, performance is such an embodied practice. This embodiment in my practice comes from years of experience, things that I’ve seen in society and in my community. I really need to get into an authentic place, I can’t fake it. My works come from very specific and painful places, but these works don’t only represent me, they represent a community of people in the Philippines. I’m bringing narratives of my people that haven’t arrived in these Western art spaces, so I feel a responsibility to my community to do that in the right way.

The nature of my work requires that I commit fully to what I’m doing, during the performance itself but also day to day. I need to be in an embodied state of self. You share a part of you, you share your soul, and you are very vulnerable in that moment, but also very powerful in that moment.

You’ve talked about how your work is about the world, its history, and the future. So I’m curious what a rehearsal room looks like while you’re building, testing, experimenting with these new worlds which you introduce to audiences?

It’s interesting, my recent work, Pearls, is quite a big piece, and it’s the first piece that I’ve made on that scale. For the performance, I worked with my collaborators Lukresia Quismundo and Bunny Cadag and there were two types of rehearsals. One half of the rehearsal period took place in the Philippines and one half was in Belgium.

In the Philippines we would start each day on the beach, swimming, hanging out, understanding nature, understanding the world beyond us. Then, we would go into the house and move our bodies. Our movements were informed by what we experienced and what we gained, as we asked ourselves, “How do we embody this knowledge?”

Then, we were in Belgium for a month and we really needed to build the show technically, to have a product to show. My scenographer was there, my lighting designer, my sound designer, the performers, the video editor, everyone was there. I work quite collectively, all of these people come together to make the work.

Rehearsal for me is also the place where me and my collaborators draw out our shared experience of living in the Philippines: living by the sea, making things together in our homeland, the process of applying for a visa, getting denied at borders, being in Europe in the cold winter, experiencing what it means to be a Filipino, queer, trans body in Europe. So it’s always just trying and testing.

Void, on the other hand, is such a messy show and the rehearsals are the show. When I was touring, I was just testing things out and over two years the work itself became more concrete. Void is constantly changing because it’s a piece where I need to adapt it to all of these unconventional spaces, which I like. Pearls, however, is a set work: it has all kinds of cues and everything is written down. The pieces represent different modalities, and different ways of making.

In Void, a central moment in the performance takes place in this viscose puddle of black liquid. How did you arrive at this material, and the way it’s used in the performance?

There was one show I did with peaches in Belgium in 2022. At the end of that performance I used a black liquid and ended up splattered with it all over my mouth and I realized, “Wow, this thing, this is such a nice material and it’s a nice image. What does it look like if I cover my whole body in it?”

At the time, I was on this healing journey: I started therapy, I was working on myself and understanding my history, my childhood, everything. That all led up to creating this cosmology, I was writing about healing and how we can “void.” It’s a dance of my grieving for certain histories, it’s a lamentation, but also it uses that force to present that, in darkness there’s also a space of creation. Developing something beyond just the bad things, or the darkness.

Then, on my birthday in 2022, I was just playing with mud on my terrace in Brussels, and just absorbing myself into it. So I was like, “You know what, in my next piece, I’m going to go in this kind of direction.” I was also writing my dissertation for my master’s degree about queer ecology in relation to spirituality. So, I was mixing all of these ideologies, and that’s how I ended up with this idea to work with something very organic: water, liquid soil, lamentation, sadness.

It took us a year or two to find the right consistency. It’s a bit of a science, finding the right pH level, temperature, water content. I will not say what the material is, there are a lot of copycats.

And in Pearls it’s not just about my body anymore, it’s about a bigger community and society. How do we heal as a society?

How do you navigate your audiences and their expectations upon you and your performers?

I don’t really think about what people expect of me. I know what the work is. When I tour, for example, I know this is what I want to talk about and this is the show. It never really bothered me what people think about the piece, I never set expectations, this is what the work is now, this is what I stand for and these are the narratives that I’ve constructed and this is what I want to share with people. I am also not here to please everybody. I am here to challenge.

Why do you always come back to performance?

A lot of the performances started as 2D works, drawings, and paintings with the drawings and paintings becoming films. So Void and Pearls are really derived from films, but because I’m known as a performer, most of the work of mine out there is from my performance practice and that’s what I tour a lot.

When I make performances, I see them cinematically in my mind and then it becomes a show because I think the mode of production that I’m in right now is this kind of making process. I have a producer that is really good at performance practices, but I don’t have a gallery that actually exhibits my visual material. For the next few years I mainly have non-performance commissions, which I’m very happy to dive into.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’ve started writing a new cosmology of work, called Lost Ancestors. The trilogy Cosmological Gang Bang, which includes Pearls and Void, really focused on recreating mythology or envisioning a future based on fantasy-making. With this new cosmology I’m writing, I’m trying to understand where my great-great grandfather is from.

Two weeks ago, I was able to find a document from my grandpa. His name is Roki, and for the longest time, I thought he was a Japanese imperial soldier who was relocated to the Philippines during World War II, but I was mistaken. Actually, he moved to the Philippines during the first huge migration of Japanese people out of Japan around 1909 or 1920. He was relocated to the Philippines, in Negros. So now that I have his name, I also have his parents’ name, and I’m trying to trace way back, to see what my lineage in Japan is.

The work is also exploring how we lose ancestry and how we lose track of where we’re coming from. It may be due to natural forces or it could be man–made things, like genocide and war. Histories of colonization and violence unfold when we ask why some people have access to their ancestry and others don’t. I’m trying to understand the policies, governments, structures  that rewrite history based on imposed ideology.

So, I’m diving into that research, my own genealogy, and the genealogy of a Filipino spiritual body. I’m going to the mountains to meet the shamans that I’ve been working with to try and understand what is a Filipino body beyond colonization by looking at spiritual practices. I can’t really say what it is going to be yet, but for me to arrive there, I need to focus on each of my practices, like film, installation, and sonography, in a scale that I haven’t worked with. That’s my work for 2025 and 2026, so that in 2027, I’ll be ready to present the final work. I’m taking time to just dive into these new worlds that I’m trying to articulate and to understand the politics around them. So, being here in the Philippines has quite been helpful. I’m very excited.