Justin Talplacido Shoulder: ANITO

For early Filipinos, like many still today, it is believed that a life force or soul inhabits all entities, both animate and inanimate. These spirits are called Anitos.

Co-created by Justin Talplacido Shoulder (The Glitter Militia, Club Até), ANITO combines collective craft, puppetry, dance and experimental electronic music to reimagine these myths and stories for the now. It is a work rooted in Sydney’s underground queer and diasporic club scenes.

The collective behind ANITO create a ‘queer Filipino future folkloric space of storytelling’ that centres the importance of nature spirits, intuiting with them as guides towards imagining possible parallel futures.

Performers Shoulder and Victoria Hunt transform into animal-human-plant-machine hybrids. In this world of sheer terror and tremendous beauty, they interrogate colonial wrongdoings and queer ancestral mythologies.

Justin Talplacido Shoulder is a shape-shifting artist and storyteller, working primarily in performance, sculpture, video and collective events. Also known as Phasmahammer, their practice is an eco-cosmology of alter personas based on queered ancestral myth, and they believe in performance and shared ceremony as communal medicine for difficult times.

ANITO has been produced by Insite Arts and supported by the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government initiative; Create NSW; the Australian Government’s Major Festivals Initiative, managed by Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body, in association with the Confederation of Australian International Arts Festivals Inc., commissioned by RISING, Sydney Festival and MONA FOMA.