In Conversation: Joshua Serafin

Preparations are currently underway for Joshua Serafin’s solo presentation, Grieve the Departed Wounds. As we collaborate with the artist to bring their vision to life this March, we sat down with them to discuss their creative process.In this dialogue, Joshua reflects on their personal and artistic journey, unpacks the transition from live body to static object, revealing how he builds new worlds from the scars of the past.

Q: Please provide a short introduction about yourself and your works.

Hi, my name is Joshua Serafin. I'm a Filipino artist currently based in Brussels for the past 10 years, but I' been navigating both back in the Philippines and the region, as well as Belgium. My practice is solely focuses on performance and choreography, but also extends into film, installation, and sculpture and I think I would say it's a bit of multimedia where all of these different practice, I combine and create different works and what I find relevant to what the themes I am working with. I work with themes of spirituality, ecology, and queerness, and how these themes focus and centralize on the narratives that I want to build in terms of world making, but as well how to expand this narratives beyond what it's usually are and what it seems.

Q: You are translating the ephemeral energy of live performance into static objects within a gallery. Do you view these installations as 'remains' of a past event, or do they take on a new, separate life of their own once the body is absent?
They are both.

Having these objects in a space simultaneously marks the remains of a time and continues to exist on their own. They’re remnants of a performative body that lived in this space—swords I used, pieces of scenography, worn props—and those objects carry traces of choreography and action. Different materiality translate the body’s movement into something static, but that static thing still holds the history of what happened.

I’m always figuring out how to present those two states: material and immaterial, relic and proposition. I want the objects to read as autonomous works, but also to reference the performance and the essence of each piece beyond the event. They show where and how they were used or transformed, and they ask: How do we make relics of time? How do we encapsulate movement and choreography in an object? Placed in the gallery, they can suggest or propose choreography—suggesting movement physically and mentally for the viewer—even without the body present.

Q: In this exhibition, the concept of the wound expands beyond the body, becoming an atmospheric space that surrounds the viewer. How does this shift from an internal feeling to an external environment resonate with your understanding of grief? Do you view the wound as a place that one inhabits?
This concept—it really comes from a lot of the works that exist in this space. It came from deep, deep wounds and deep pain. For example, Void is a work within Cosmological Gangbang that really started from a lot of personal pain, and I tried to create—hopefully—a space of healing. For me, making this work has been a space of reconciliation. It has been a space for creating different modalities for my own healing, let’s say.

Having experienced such a depressive state when I was younger, and the accumulation of a lot of pain I’ve endured as a living body, so much of that pain comes from leaving home when I was young, from constantly moving and migrating, from being in a constant state of adaptation across different kinds of worlds. And even something as simple as heartbreak. 

I guess pain is such a strong force in the act of creating. For me, it has also been a place of inspiration. These works, they are wounds. But they are wounds that have healed, wounds that have been encapsulated in time, and encapsulated within different materials and different forms. That’s kind of my initial input into this.

But I guess the question is also: how do I expand this idea of wounds? How can this exhibition be a place where experiences come together, and at the same time become a space of healing? But also a space that proposes grieving.

Do I view this as a place that one inhabits? I think we can. I think it’s actually many places where we can be. We can remain there, or we can allow ourselves to depart from that place—but we can always move in and out. I see it as a state of being, where these worlds, these emotions and experiences, become places and resources we can return to if necessary. And I think, one way or another, they will always teach us something about pain

Q:⁠ ⁠Your practice often involves the creation of new deities and cosmologies, acts of powerful imagination and world-building. How does the 'wound' fit into this process of creation? Do you view the wound as a site of destruction, or is it the necessary soil from which these new figures and myths must emerge?

"Creation and destruction are inseparable. The space in between is a particularly interesting place to inhabit."

When I created these alter egos, these spirits, it took a lot of time. It took a lot of therapy, a lot of work, and a lot of internal processes to understand what these demons—or these alter deities within me—were doing. I arrived at a point where I was confronting all these demons and personas that exist within me, and that’s where I actually met these spirits.

These spirits are characters where I realized: instead of hiding for so long—which is something we often do with our demons—maybe I needed to let them come out. For me, liberation from that pain came through allowing these alter egos to emerge. These spirits are beings I created in my mind to protect me, to absorb the pain of leaving home, the pain of loneliness, the pain of heartbreak, the pain of experiencing many horrible things throughout my life.

Being able to dance with these beings that I created, and giving them a platform to exist, has been a way for me to liberate myself from that dark realm. In that sense, I create these deities, I build these worlds, and this entire process of creation is not an escape—but a way to respond to and cope with the realities I am living in. And also the realities humanity is living in. The dystopian world we inhabit is intense, and for me, myth-making and world-building become ways of proposing a different kind of futurity—one that I hope we might be able to land in.

Do I view the wound as a flaw in the structure, or as the necessary soil from which figures and breath must emerge? For me, creation and destruction are inseparable. You cannot create without destroying, and you cannot destroy without creating. These are part of a cycle that we are constantly moving through.

I think the space in between those two realms—the in-between state—is a particularly interesting place to inhabit. In uncertainty, in process, we generate ideologies, beings, bodies, worlds, entities, and myths. Historically, this is something humans have always done, and I find that deeply beautiful. I don’t believe one can exist without the other. And I don’t see this as a simple polarity of good and bad. It’s more about multiple things emerging at the same time, in tension, in coexistence.