2025 Curatorial Statement

November 20, 2024

The 20th anniversary PuSh Festival is a celebration of audacious live art. These are performances and immersive experiences that shift our paradigms for creative expression and how we relate to one another. In a world increasingly dominated by generative AI, they underscore live performance as a sanctuary of authenticity in an age that risks losing touch with the real. They invite us into the wilds of untethered imaginations and the liberatory spaces of play. Accept the invitation and be transported from the brutalist landscape and inherited mythologies of Bogota to the astro-glam extravaganza of a dune wars kiki ball, to the 8-kilometer passage between Güzelçamli and Samos, to the blue neon luminescence of an imagined Saigon … and beyond. 

This 2025 Festival is a celebration of alterity. Of indeterminacy, or things that refuse to be fixed, of transcultural perspectives and transpofagic manifestos. It holds radical expressions of gender empowerment and self-reflexive drag. It reflects the fluidity of human experience and camps at the crossroads of contradictions. 

It invites us to sit with troubling questions over a dish of rellenong bangus (stuffed milkfish); to chew on how colonial legacies shape today’s global food market; to remove the veil of normalcy as catastrophe encroaches; to find humour in the directionlessness of the modern world; and to meditate on possible futures from our bathtubs.

It’s a social experiment incubating new sensibilities and new experiences of subjectivity. It is ethereal voices in a land of snowy obscurity and audiovisual blitz that undermines the reliability of perception. It’s an exercise in shapeshifting between fiction and reality, real and imagined remembrances, and the disparate states of ecstasy and desolation.

It’s a resonant affirmation of bodily self-possession manifested in the electric intimacy of a charged nightclub haze.

It’s an animist ritual conjuring deep-sea entities, sentient structures, hybrid creatures, and performative rice-cookers.

This celebration-invitation-experiment-affirmation-ritual beckons what posthumanist thinker Báyò Akómoláfé terms a “more generous cosmology” replete with new strategies for “locating ourselves”.

It promises something emergent and fugitive.

And it promises the bittersweet fragrance of oranges.