In Acts of Service, Keith Lafuente stages a carnivalesque installation of kinetic and static sculptures that explore the many connotations of “service”—sexual, military, culinary, religious, and altruistic. Animated fabric figures perform cycles of labor and desire: a go-go boy waiter balances on a table, a sailor pole dances on a pig spit, watched by tarsiers and turtles. Their movements repeat endlessly, visible to us but invisible to themselves.
Deeply informed by Filipino hospitality traditions and global inequities of labor shaped by colonial history, Lafuente’s practice complicates ideas of empowerment, degradation, and beauty—layering kink, spectacle, and satire into one unsettling stage.
