Fractured Divinities
CLUB PERFORMANCE-INSTALLATION
APOLEMIA: Mario Barrantes Espinoza | Lydia McGlinchey | Fake Moss
X Joshua Serafin
Emerging as three queer, otherworldly beings inside a pulsating clubscape, this triptych unites Mario Barrantes Espinoza, Joshua Serafin, and Lydia McGlinchey in a shape-shifting festival experience where performance, sound, and nightlife bleed into one another.
Each solo forms a distinct universe within a shared queer ecosystem: in Max-hete, Mario Barrantes Espinoza rises from tropical swamps as a sensual spirit forged from soil, fire, and anti-colonial memory; in Relics: An Eye Once Blind, Joshua Serafin summons an ancestral apparition excavating erased lineages and generational hauntings; and in Ornament, Lydia McGlinchey ascends above the crowd as a shining, rotating creature of surface and spectacle: a living disco-ball that mesmerises, objectifies, and unravels in the same gesture. As these three entities unfold and converge, Fake Moss’s (Pierre Bayet) soundscape mutates into a full club set: textures, bass and restless percussion gather force, where club music feels liberating, sweat becomes ritual, and chaos unravels in rhythm: carrying the audience from mythical worlds into collective dance.
Born out of queer nightlife and first presented at KAPUT 9 in Manila, this 3-in-1 format offers an unprecedented, otherworldly encounter. It is a feminist and decolonial undercurrent made flesh: where queer bodies, avant-garde performance, political fierceness, and electronic club culture merge to create a temporary space of identity-shifting and visually transformative performance.
Mario Barrantes Espinoza
Maxete
Maxhete is a nightlife-born performance that moves between installation, choreography, and live music to conjure a queer spirit rising from tropical swamps, colonial ruins, and Costa Rican leyendas. Rooted in the histories of Central American banana enclaves, it unfolds as a shapeshifting contemporary myth where soil, fire, sound, and the banana become agents for reimagining nature, gender, and power.
Mario Barrantes Espinoza is an artist of Costa Rican–Nicaraguan heritage. Embedded in Latinx sensibilities, Mario slides between theatre stages, music concerts, and messy party nights. They’ve collaborated with a wide range of artists across the performing arts and music scenes. Their interest in blending performance and club culture comes through in CULO SHAKING NIGHT and the co-creation of the collective APOLEMIA, two party-based projects that fuse the work of performers, DJs, and visual artists within Brussels’ underground nightlife.
Joshua Serafin
Relics
Relics is a solo performance and video work in which Joshua Serafin summons erased genealogies through movement, ritual, and embodied storytelling. Tracing the forgotten journey of their great-great-grandfather, a Japanese migrant worker in early-1900s Philippines, the piece confronts ancestral loss, colonial violence, and the body’s attempt to exorcise what it inherits.
Ornament transforms Lydia McGlinchey into a suspended, rotating body of mirrored surfaces: a living disco-ball, turning the dancefloor into a site of spectacle, desire, and dangerous visibility. Embracing “surface” as a place of agency and tension, the piece engages with histories of the female body as decoration to expose the seductive, alienating, and ecstatic pull of becoming an object to be watched.
Lydia McGlinchey
Ornament
Lydia McGlinchey is a multi-disciplinary artist and performer based in Brussels, working at the intersection of dance, performance, textile/fibre‐art and scenography. Born in 1998 in Sydney, Australia, of Peruvian-Australian descent.
Her work combines choreography, scenography, textile and performance to forge intense atmospheres. She draws from the lineage of the gothic and surreal aesthetics to meditate on uncomfortable issues emerging from contemporary life like the modern woman, cultural alienation, and distortion of desire.
Fake Moss
Fake Moss is a Brussels-based storyteller in sound. Through organic textures and restless percussion, his sets are an invitation to abandon certainty.
He navigates genres like shifting tides, always mutating, never still. Every set is an experiment, a tension that never settles. In the club, he moves through Bass, Breakbeat, Experimental, Jungle and Techno — always with a nod to pop culture — where club music feels liberating, sweat becomes ritual, and chaos unravels in rhythm.
He is a resident at Kiosk Radio, where he hosts “It’s Never Too Late to Stan” — an immersive dive into an artist’s universe, exploring their discography through a carefully curated 20-track selection. He co-founded Apolemia, an event reshaping Brussels’ club landscape by merging live performance with underground electronic music.
When not behind the decks, Fake Moss crafts immersive soundscapes, such as Buried in a Coffin the Size of a Grain of Rice for Horst Festival in Brussels and the live score for Joshua Serafin’s Relics.
Apolemia is a Brussels-based collective founded in 2024 by Pierre Bayet (aka Fake Moss), Lydia McGlinchey, Mario Barrantes Espinoza, and Martín Zícari. Operating at the intersection of performance, installation, sound, and nightlife, Apolemia develops events that explore collective creation, social encounter, and the shifting boundaries between art and party. The collective takes its name from a marine organism composed of thousands of specialized individuals, each autonomous yet physiologically connected. Similarly, Apolemia conceives its events as a constellation of "artistic voices, contexts, and practices that assemble temporarily to form a dynamic whole”. Each gathering functions as a living organism, interdependent and greater than the sum of its parts. Apolemia’s curatorial approach seeks to expand the possibilities of performance within nightlife, proposing the party as a site of artistic experimentation and communal experience. By combining diverse practices and perspectives, the collective generates spaces where performance, sound, and social exchange converge to produce forms that are porous, and continually transforming.
Photos taken in KAPUT Manila Organised by Derek Tumala
Produced by Jan Pineda
Photographs from Davide Belotti, Gab Villareal and Kevin Cantos
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