Justin Shoulder is a Sydney-based artist working in performance, sculpture, video and nightlife/community events production. His main body of work, Phasmahammer, is an ecology of alter personae based on queered ancestral myth. These creatures are embodied through hand-crafted costumes and prosthesis and animated by their own gestural languages. Shoulder uses his body and craft to forge connections between queer, migrant, spiritual, and intercultural experiences.
1.
MASSKARA FESTIVAL, BACOLOD, PHILIPPINES
In October I visited the MassKara Festival in Bacolod, Philippines.
The festival was originally conceived as a response in 1980 to a period of crisis: a major boat accident coupled with a low demand in for the region’s main produce, sugar. This “festival of smiles” developed with a function to bring the community out of pervasive gloom. Each barangay (village) enters a team of kids decked out in the most extravagant masquerade costumes, made by their community. Something about the creation of a community language through craft, dance, and spectacle really grounded me in my relationship to Filo culture and storytelling. Especially the role of irreverence in drawing people out of sadness.
2.
TACLOBAN BARANGAY PAGEANT
As part of my research travels in the Philippines with collaborator Bhenji Ra, we reconnected with our friend/collaborator Jai Jai to meet with her performance crew Trez Rakateras. They invited us to their community pageant. Earnest baby boy ballads, crepe paper curtains, and palm trees deck the stage in a small park. The girls dance and mime in the dirt to cut up soul and pop that is ripped and remixed into exorcist abstraction. Rogue testicles in leotard gymnastics send the crowd screaming. “Let It Go” from Frozen reimagined with catapulting talcum powder. Storytelling by the sissies for the community is where it’s at.
3.
UGAT LAHI COLLECTIVE: CRAFT AS PROTEST
I first saw UGAT Lahi’s work at the Metropolitan Museum in Manila.
Large effigies of political figures are collectively built, paraded down the street in protests and then lit on fire. They are an organisation of artists and critics with a common goal of creatively expressing visual resistance to the existing oppressive social order. This history of community craft as catharsis really emboldened my own interests in the importance of street political spectacle.
4.
H.O.H
This year my partner Matthew Stegh launched his label HOH (Haus of Hellmutti). It’s been exciting to see him draw from his performance, illustration, and design histories to create something in line with his politics and community. He is motivated to reignite local manufacturing industries and works with found/recycled fabrics to do short-run capsule collections. The graphics on the clothing draw from his interests in metal iconography, the tension between church and state and queer community resistance. I think his description of “aggressive comfortable clothes for sex poz sluts n bad bitches” really sums it up.
5.
YUNG_PUEBLO
I’ve been searching for ways to calm my mind with the goal to find a quiet focus. Perhaps it was the accessible entry point through Instagram where I first read Diego Perez’s writing—but I found I could relate to his poetics and intention. Sometimes when I’m manic I’ll flick through his book inward to a random page.
6.
LATAI TAUMOEPEAU
The work I’ve seen from Latai on climate change and its effects on Pacific communities is so powerful and urgent. She is embedded and invested long term and really puts her body on the line. She is one who acts on what she speaks.
7.
CORIN’S FATAL REDEMPTION
Corin is a Filipina Australian artist, producer, and performer based in Naarm/Melbourne. She manages to create something so idiosyncratic—drawing from her background in classical composition and combining it with her interests in speculative fiction and video games as well influences from Ryuichi Sakamato to the cinematic futurism of Vangelis. If I’m in turbulence on an airplane I close my eyes and listen to Fatal Redemption by Corin; something about the intensity soothes my nerves.
8.
OCTAVIA BUTLER’S LILITH’S BROOD
“For a time the earth seemed wild and strange to Akin—a profusion of life almost frightening in its complexity.” I keep reflecting on the way the Oankali aliens describe the human contradiction as the center to why it won’t survive. A conflict between humanity’s genetic traits: intelligence and hierarchical thinking. In the development of my own cosmology of work, Octavia Butler’s trilogy has totally informed the potential of sci-fi to speak to colonization, imperialist relationships, genetic science, and evolution, as well as combining elements of myth. It is possible,and it can be powerful.
9.
BHENJI RA + TAKING THE RISK
Some of the most jaw-dropping moments I’ve had this year involved my sis and collaborator Bhenji Ra. She really draws people together across the intersections of community in Sydney and beyond. As mother of the house of Sydney-based vogue house Slé, she’s been nurturing a young family of trans and queer Asia Pacific sissies.
She also is the one that pushes me—literally—to take leaps, whether it be into the waters of Cebu with whale sharks, holding my hand to swim amongst them, or to really confront and connect where I sit within the world as a bicultural Queer Filipino Australian Sissy Freak. She tells me how it is… and I love her for that.
10.
CARRION
Carrion is a performance work/avatar that breathes to life my own speculative fiction cosmology. I’ve been developing this body of work for the last two years. Carrion is probably my most embodied avatar so far, and I’ve been able to expand its movement language in more detail than anything else in my practice. It really came as a challenge to my previous work, which was much more visual arts focused. I feel proud of how far I’ve come and how much more articulate I can be as a performer and storyteller. I’ve been collecting people’s responses to the work to remind myself why the work is important. There have been so many dramatic responses, poetry, essays and personal exchanges that have supported my logic for being an artist. The club episodic works have given me the agency to tour the world and my theater work will begin an international tour next year.
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