RETURN AND RELIC
In dialogue with Joshua Serafin
FVTVRIST Magazine // 7 May 2026
FVTVRIST meets Joshua Serafin.
Born in the Philippines and based in Brussels, Joshua Serafin has developed one of the most singular practices at the intersection of performance and visual art. Moving across choreography, ritual and installation, their work draws on mythology, queer politics and ancestral memory, turning the body into a site of transformation.
A house artist at VIERNULVIER and widely recognized since VOID at the 60th Venice Biennale, Serafin belongs to a generation of artists expanding performance into something far less stable, more speculative, more embodied and unruly. Following Void and ahead of the next unfolding of Relics, they reflect on the need to withdraw after visibility, the emotional force of tracing a long-lost Japanese lineage, and the strange precision of rehearsing in a dark club.
Joshua Serafin
Analog photo by Jean-Pierre Sylla / @h.u.e.y for Fvtvrist
Joshua Serafin, VOID
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: David Visnjic
As Venice Biennale 2026 approaches, and with your return to Venice through KUBORAUM’s programme, I’d like to begin by looking back to 2024. In the wake of Void going viral, with 63 million views, you disappeared to Sicily without your phone. What did silence offer you that noise could not?
I had made a new creation, I was touring, and I had already done eighteen shows in the first half of the year. Everything around me had become very loud. At that moment, I felt the need to find stillness. Silence gave me the time and space to understand, and to come back to my body. That was the intention. Noise could not offer me that.
In previous interviews, you’ve spoken about drawing from deeply sensitive, sometimes painful material. How do you work with that vulnerability without being overtaken by it? Where do you locate the line between embodiment and exposure?
It takes a great deal of practice to enter those different states. My work is deeply embodied: it carries history, time, my own personal narrative, but it is also continually brought into the present through performance. To step onto a stage requires clarity, but also the ability to inhabit that state in full. To reach that point, I need the full force of my instrument: my body, my mind, and everything they hold.
The real question is how to channel vulnerability without being consumed by it. In some ways, it is like acting: you have to learn when to open that space and when to step out of it.
Joshua Serafin
Analog photo by Jean-Pierre Sylla / @h.u.e.y for Fvtvrist
You are returning to Venice this year with a program by KUBORAUM. How does it feel? What is different this time around?
Venice holds such a special place for me. I had a monumental experience there, so I’m genuinely excited to return and I feel more prepared this time.
Two years ago, I arrived knowing what the Biennale was in theory, but not really understanding what it meant in practice. Coming back now feels different. I’m looking forward to seeing the people I met there, reconnecting with them and also measuring where I am now in relation to where I was then.
I’m also very glad to bring Relics. It is still a work in progress, but all my works are. They take time. Even Void was still evolving when I presented it in Venice. So yes, it feels very meaningful to return.
Joshua Serafin,
VOID, 2022, Video, 9 min 14 sec
VOID, 2023–2024, Performance, 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia Photo: Andrea Avezzù
Joshua Serafin, Relics, 2026
M+, Hong Kong
Photo: Tze Long
Can you talk more about Relics? What feels essential to understand about this work?
Relics really started with research. Early last year, I found documents from my great-great-grandfather, including his birth certificate. Through that document, I was able to go to Japan.
Long story short, I went to the address where I got his certificate from. After a year of preparation, I was able to prove to the municipality that I am part of his family. That allowed me to access birth certificates going back to the 1840s, even to his great-grandfather. That is about nine or ten generations down the line.
Through that process, I was able to find my long-lost Japanese family, which was an emotional freedom. The cousin of my grandfather, whom I met there, brought us to a shrine where all my family members are buried. We prayed, we offered blessings, we asked for guidance.
When I went back to the hotel, I just collapsed, because I had this very visceral feeling that something was coming out of my body. For me, it felt like I had brought my great-great-grandfather’s spirit back to his family, because he was never able to return. He died in the Philippines, and then there was World War II and everything that followed.
We always ask our ancestors for guidance, but I realized that we can also fulfill their desires, their earthly desires, even a century later, if we know their stories.
That is what Relics is about. A relic is an object that no longer functions or serves in the way it once did. It has lived through time and had a purpose, but it no longer has that function. For me, the question is: how can I be a relic and tell stories from the past that are no longer present, and bring them into the now? How can a body, through my own history, become a choreography of narratives that are no longer present? This character, Relics, is trying to exercise those narratives by becoming that figure.
After performing, what do you keep? How does the work evolve afterwards in your practice?
My work never really stops developing and that is what I find beautiful about it. Every performance shifts within my body and every context in which I present it transforms it as well.
Even when I return to the same piece again and again, it is never quite the same. It continues to grow, and I value that openness very much.
We always ask our ancestors for guidance, but I realized that we can also fulfill their desires, their earthly desires, even a century later, if we know their stories.
What do I take with me afterwards? Many things. But most simply, I carry the responsibility of being on stage. You are being witnessed by others, so the question becomes: what do you give, what do you take and how do you remain accountable for the experience you have
So with Relics, since you are performing it in several cities before its world premiere in September, does each performance bring something new? Does the work keep developing until that final presentation?
Yes. For me, September is a deadline. At some point I have to say, okay, that’s complete. Otherwise I would just continue changing and developing the work.
Right now, the work exists in different formats, depending on what fits different spaces and venues. In London, I had two of my musicians, but not my light technician. In Hong Kong, I only had my light technician. In September, we will all be in the same space. It will become a two-hour experience.
I love that freedom, the joy of being able to mold the work according to context, scale and what is possible. I have performed it in very large and in very small venues, so the experience of the piece changes all the time.
Even when it has its world premiere, that premiere will simply be the full-scale potential of the work: all my team with me, in a two-hour sonic experience where people can come in and out, have tea, have a sound bath, pray, experience performance and audiovisual elements, many things. In a way, it will arrive at the fullness of the piece. What happens after, I don’t know yet.
just created?
Joshua Serafin, VOID, Dark Mofo
Courtesy of Dark MOFO
Photo: Jesse Huniford
When do you feel a work is done? Do you always set yourself a deadline, or sometimes the sense of completion arrives on its own terms?
With Void, it took three years for the piece to become what it is. With Relics, I still don’t know. Maybe it will arrive there in September. Maybe it will continue to change.
Right now, it feels complete in one version, which is the shorter one. As a performing body, I know a piece has reached a certain point when I have choreographed it and I begin repeating the same gestures. Until then, if I still feel like I am playing around with it, then it is not done yet.
You have described 2025 and 2026 as years of research, with your practice moving further into film, installation, spirituality, geology and sound. You’ve also mentioned the desire to present a culminating work in 2027. What form do you imagine that taking?
Well, you’ll have to wait and see! I don’t want to go into too much detail yet, but it will bring together all the works I’ve been developing this year. The sculptures, the films, the performances, everything within the Lost Ancestor realm, will come together in one space, unfolding over a certain duration.
You have also performed in nightlife contexts, notably with Fractured Divinities. What can a body do in nightlife that it cannot do within the theatre or the white cube? And how does choreography shift for you across those different settings?
I had so much fun with Divinities. It took place in Manila, within the context of a party called Kaput, founded by one of my best friends, Derek Tumala, who is an incredible Filipino artist working with visuals, sculpture, light and design.
He created Kaput out of a desire to give young queer Filipinos a space for raving and it has grown into a very successful event of around 1,600 people since. That was not something we often saw in Manila before. Through that party, he helped cultivate a culture of raving there, a space of freedom, which really surprised me because I had not experienced Manila in that way when I was still living there twelve years ago.
What is especially interesting is that it is a rave, but it begins with a two-hour performance programme: performance, singing, dancing, trumpet, lecture-performance and only then does it become a rave. You do not really encounter that in Europe. Here, it tends to be more straightforward.
In general, I really enjoy performing in festivals, musical contexts and raves, because people are more open to receiving what is there. They are in a different state of mind and they come with a different relation to experience, gathering, and collectivity. Theatre does not do that in the same way. In theatre, you have an individual experience from a seat. In these other spaces, people are already dancing, having a drink, moving around, carrying a sense of play and adventure. Theatre is much more formalised in how one is expected to behave.
For me, performing in those situations offers far more freedom as a performer to create a cohesive experience with everyone present.
What has nightlife brought into your life? Was it also a space of exploration for you on a personal level?
Nightlife is where I rehearse my pieces.
I do not really go into the studio and work as a dancer. The gym is one place where I imagine things, but clubbing and raving is where I enter a very different state. That is where I begin to imagine physicality, where I do my movement exploration, where I research the characters I play.
I am in a little corner, in a dark room, while everyone else is dancing, and I am just there choreographing the whole piece.
And I am just like, okay, I am going to do that.
Joshua Serafin,
Lost Ancestors
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: Michiel Devieer
Joshua Serafin, Relics, 2026
M+, Hong Kong
Photo: Tze Long
About Joshua Serafin
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. They are house artist of Viernulvier for the season 2023-2027.
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, for which they are currently touring.
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.
They received multiple nominations as well as awards such as: Anti Festival Live Arts Prize (2023). Forbes list 30 under 30 Asia (2024). They were nominated for the Circa Art Prize (2024) and One of the recipeint of 13th Artist award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines (2024), and ArtNews top 12 defining artworks in (2024)
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