ARTIST BIO:
Alvin Collantes (b. 1989, New Jersey) is a Filipino-Canadian artist whose practice moves across choreography, performance, drag, and social encounter. Working with the body as both archive and site of possibility, they create performances that blur the boundaries between ritual and spectacle, intimacy and public life, humour and grief.
Rooted in experiences of migration and shaped through queer and diasporic ways of knowing, Collantes' work considers how identity is performed, inherited, and transformed. Their performances attend to the tensions between visibility and disappearance, labour and pleasure, vulnerability and resistance, asking how embodied practices might reimagine the ways we belong to ourselves and to one another.
Collantes is currently an artist-in-residence at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. Their work has been developed and presented in collaboration with institutions including Futurium Berlin, Schwules Museum Berlin, Galerie im Turm, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Sophiensæle, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Goethe-Institut. Their collaborations include AsianDopeBoys/Tianzhou Chen, KDV Performance Group/Kiani Del Valle, and RambaZamba Theatre/Jacob Höhne.
How does the work move?
Enter “Bibingka,”
“Bibingka” introduces the artistic methodology behind my drag practice. Emerging from personal grief, Bibingka evolved into an embodied practice of imagining new forms of authorship, care, and queer becoming. Through performance, materiality, and new forms of ritual, she offers a way of thinking with the body that transforms inherited histories into possibilities for other futures.
You can see her live her live in Horse Meat Disco, Lunchbox Candy, Dissident, BRENN, and Pyramid Party, as well as festivals like WHOLE Queer United Festival, Garbicz, and Bucht Der Träumer. Bibingka is a member of Queens Against Borders, uplifting refugee and migrant drag artists, and Slaysians, an all-Asian drag collective reclaiming space in the global scene.
Enter “Dose of Pleasure,”
Dose of Pleasure is my community-based artistic methodology that explores how movement, pleasure, and collective presence can become practices of care. Emerging from dancefloor culture and community work in the Berlin nightlife, it creates participatory spaces where strangers become collaborators, relationships are choreographed through embodied encounters, and collective movement offers alternative ways of relating beyond productivity, identity, and performance.
