Abigail Severance

Devi lives alone in a bunker with one precious window to the war-ravaged world outside. One day, Devi hears a sound outside her window, and she sees a real live person for the first time. It's a woman named M, the leader of a group of Outsiders, vagabonds and outcasts.

In evidence, Julie Tolentino’s naked, moving body articulates backward on her hands and knees, balancing a cluster of Asian medicine cups. The piece, originally made in 2010 in collaboration with Abigail Severance, was remixed for Visual AIDS in 2014. Tolentino's self-made sound piece was added and initiates the video with a queer list of loved ones living and lost, recognizable or not, as both invocation and provocation of individuals who deeply shifted her perspective. As the listed names blur and are archived in Tolentino's body, evidence opens up to the list's potency through a female, brown, artist/activist body in the unseen yet held spaces of relationship, memory, sex and loss. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2014 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, a program of seven videos that bring together charged moments and personal memories amidst the public history of HIV/AIDS.

A darkly comic tale of the heart and how it might be more than the sum of its parts. Pump was Severance’s debut film and screened at over 60 festivals worldwide, winning five best short awards.

A darkly comic tale of the heart and how it might be more than the sum of its parts. Pump was Severance’s debut film and screened at over 60 festivals worldwide, winning five best short awards.

Henry and Twiggy, two gender-bending delinquents break into a church and hide-out from the police for a night. While there they discover the dead body of a homeless man in the confessional, and Henry, a tom-boy with absent-father issues spends the night trying to make some sense out of the loss of this complete stranger.

A night train carries us to a rewilding site where we will face the apocalypse (as if there will only be one).