The Body as Archive and Witness: Performance-making at the intersection of body, labor, and migration

About the Artists

• Alvin Collantes

  Alvin William Collantes (b. 1989, New Jersey) is a Queer Filipino performance artist based in Berlin (Germany). Their interdisciplinary body-centered practice merges improvisation, contemporary dance, decolonial perspectives, the art of drag, and queer dance floor histories as both archival and embodied sites for resistance and transformation. Through movement and performance, Alvin explores migration, displacement, and the diasporic struggles of loss, memory, and belonging while imagining new possibilities for queer-centred worlds. They are a participant of the Performance Ecologies Residency hosted by the Goethe-Institute Philippines under the curation of Eisa Jocson and Franchesca Casauay, where they continue to deepen their artistic research. Alvin often has premiered works in Futurium Berlin and collaborate with artists such as Kiani Del Valle of KDV Performance Group; Leeroy New, RambaZamba Theatre and Alvin Tolentino of Company Erasga Vancouver, and recently exhibited at Schwules Museum in Berlin for "Young Birds from Strange Mountains." In 2026, Alvin will be premiering their solo work titled "Bibingka" at Tanztage Berlin in Sophiensaele.

• Eisa Jocson

  Eisa Jocson is an interdisciplinary artist based in La Union, Philippines. Trained as a visual artist with a background in ballet, she came to contemporary dance through pole dancing. In her works, she explores body politics in the service and entertainment industry as seen through the socioeconomic lens of the Philippines. She studies how the body moves and what conditions make it move – be it social mobility or movement out of the Philippines through migrant work. In her creations, from ‘Death of the Pole Dancer’ to ‘Macho Dancer’ to ‘Host’ to ‘Princess’ to ‘Superwoman Band’ and ‘Manila Zoo’ – capital is the driving force of movement pushing the indentured body into developed geographies. She regularly presents her pieces at renowned theatres and international festivals in Asia and Europe, such as Tanz im August, TPAM Yokohama, Zürcher Theaterspektakel and Frankfurter Positionen. She is a recipient of the 2018 Cultural Centre of the Philippines 13 Artists Award, the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award 2019, the SeMa-HANA Award 2021 and the Tabori Award International 2023.

• Jenny Logico-Cruz

  Jenny Logico-Cruz is a performance-maker, teacher, and cultural worker interested in challenging the process, boundaries, and expectations of performance, as well as exploring novel frameworks and methods of engaging with the audience while tackling significant contemporary issues that intersect the personal, social, cultural, and political. She is the co-founder and artistic director of Langgam Performance Troupe, a Manila-based contemporary performance company focusing on experimental, process-based, and practice-as-research works.

• Diego Maranan

  Diego is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, designer, and researcher whose work explores the intersections of embodiment, technology, ecology, and future imaginaries. His creative practice bridges digital media, biological systems, and somatic experience, often through installations, wearables, and participatory experiments that foreground human and more-than-human relationships. He is currently Professor at the Faculty of Information and Communication Studies of the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU), where he has also held leadership roles as Dean; the Chair of the Bachelor of Arts in Multimedia Studies program; the Program Development Associate for Culture and the Arts; and the representative to the University of the Philippines President’s Committee for Culture and the Arts, among others. Diego is currently the Deputy Director for Research at the UP Intelligent Systems Center, where he drives support for research initiatives in artificial intelligence, data science, complex systems, and human-centered technologies for socioeconomic good. In this capacity, he advocates for the national engagement by the arts and humanities with science, technology, and complex systems. His work has been exhibited internationally in festivals, museums, and artscience platforms in Europe, Asia, and North America. He is a co-founder of SEADS (Space Ecologies Art and Design), a global artscience collective engaged in creative prototyping of the future, and of Curiosity, a Philippine-based design research consultancy. Across these contexts, Diego engages in collaborative projects that are speculative, grounded, and pluridisciplinary.