MUR 020 | JOSHUA SERAFIN || LOST ANCESTORS
Lost Ancestors is a research project by Joshua Serafin that begins with uncertainty—with a question that initiates the work: How did we lose track of our ancestors? From this starting point, Serafin undertakes a process of tracing familial lineages, searching for stories, memories, and presences that have slipped away through displacement, silence, and historical rupture. The project unfolds as an inquiry into absence as much as recovery, engaging archival fragments, embodied practices, and speculative reconstruction to consider how ancestral knowledge is obscured, transformed, or erased over time.
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During the residency, Joshua visited Ishigaki during Obon, a significant time in the island’s calendar when the boundaries between the living and the dead are understood to become porous. In the Yaeyama context, Obon is marked by distinctive ritual performances, dance, and music through which ancestors are welcomed, entertained, and sent back. Encountering these practices offered a lived framework for reflecting on ancestry not as a fixed lineage, but as a relational, performative presence—activated through gesture, sound, and collective memory.
At the closing presentation, Joshua shared his family tree and the history of his family, mapping genealogical lines alongside gaps and silences. Rather than a conclusive account, the presentation foregrounded uncertainty, revealing ancestry as an ongoing process of loss, remembering, and reconfiguration.
Joshua Serafin is an artist whose practice spans performance, choreography, moving image, and research-based inquiry. Their work engages with questions of ancestry, ritual, and embodiment, drawing on Indigenous cosmologies, speculative methodologies, and non-human ecologies. Through durational performances, film, and site-responsive research, Serafin examines how histories are transmitted, interrupted, or erased, and how ancestral knowledge persists through the body, landscape, and collective memory.
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Serafin’s projects often emerge from long-term research processes that combine archival investigation, embodied practice, and collaboration. Attentive to places of transition—such as caves, shorelines, and ritual sites—their work foregrounds the permeability between human and non-human worlds, past and present. Through these inquiries, Serafin proposes alternative modes of knowing that resist linear history and emphasize relational, lived experience.