A slightly distorted live version of Madonna’s iconic “Like a Virgin” resonates as a crypto ballerina and three sirenas, futuristic-looking humanoids dressed in colourful and patterned garments, dance on a pebbled beach by a lake on a volcano. Their choreography, midway between a drag performance and a post-apocalyptic music video, is chaotic, cacophonic, and disorienting, yet also alluringly seductive and mesmerizing. Bitcoins rain from the sky, greeted by twerking and cries of pleasure.
Welcome to the intersection of wetness and crypto mining.
Cripto Sirenas is a temporary collective made up of Anna Ehrenstein, Alexa Evangelista, Sunny Pfalzer, and Lucy Tomasino, who are engaged in a self-described science-fiction and multimedia worldbuilding venture aimed at speculating on tech-solutionism, totalitarian algorithms, and the impact of these growing realities on our bodies and environments. Rooted in a hydro-feminist worldview, the work centres on water, fluidity, and moisture as an embodied conduit for defying contemporary and future systems of oppression and exploitation that enforce rigidity, binaries, and categorization. In various fable and dreamlike settings, from public urban monuments to remote watery natural locations, the project highlights how the development of economic and resource-extraction models relies on forms of crypto-colonialism rooted in the old world and threatening to haunt future ones.
This multimodal landscape of cyborg ballerinas has at its heart a 360° video projection conceived out of a somatic writing process that immerses the viewer in a captivating narrative. Throughout the installation, the artists rearticulate and rethink the mediatization of their bodies in various artefacts. Two-dimensional remnants—brightly patterned wallpapers, punchy collages, and heavily edited photographs—provide context for the scattered three-dimensional sculptural representations and appendages of the artists’ performing selves that populate the space. Video-recorded theoretical conversations with web3 researcher Josh Davila mix and contrast with an organic ecology that combines the digital with the physical; the real with the more-than-unreal; the messy, leaky multi-faceted humanoid with the sleekness of the mainframe. Multiplying their presence throughout, the Cripto Sirenas are an ever-evolving proposition, submerging their audience into a wash cycle of information, affect, and movement, a living altar and a Manifesto for Moist Futures.
Curator: Didier Morelli
Artist
Anna Ehrenstein and Sunny Pfalzer with Alexa Evangelista and Lucy Tomasino
Biographies of the artists
Anna Ehrenstein
Born in Tirana, Albania – Lives in Berlin, Germany, and Tirana, Albania
Anna Ehrenstein’s collaborative practice spans assemblage, video, sculpture, and social formats and addresses postcolonial digital entanglements and the circulation of objects and aesthetics. She has had solo exhibitions at Museum Villa Stuck (Munich), KOW (Berlin), and the Goethe Institute (New York). She has also taken part in the Ural Biennale (2021), the Screen City Biennial (2022), the Lagos Biennial (2024), and the Biennale für Freiburg (2025). Her work has shown at Bag Factory (Johannesburg), Gropius Bau (Berlin), and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Recent distinctions include the C/O Berlin Talent Award and the Art Explora Residency.
Sunny Pfalzer
Born in Vienna, Austria – Lives in Zurich, Switzerland; Berlin, Germany; and Ternitz, Austria
Sunny Pfalzer is a performance artist, professor, and go-go-girl. Through choreography, poetry, video installations, and soft sculptures, they explore the forces and dangers of collective bodies, both in the street and in museums. Workshops and collaborations are an integral part of their practice because they offer the necessary time and space to collectively reflect and unlearn. Pfalzer’s work has been presented in New York, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich, Lisbon, and Chicago, among other cities
Alexa Evangelista
Born in El Salvador – Lives in San Salvador, El Salvador
Alexa Evangelista is a queer drag artist, visual artist, performer, and DJ who is trained in architecture and interior design. Through transfeminist resistance, they interrogate identity, historical memory, and collective trauma under Central America’s political conditions. In works confronting censorship and state persecution, Evangelista insists on alternative modes of existence. They have undertaken residencies in Nicaragua and Germany, showed in New York and Guatemala City, and performed at leading cultural venues in San Salvador.
Lucy Tomasino
Born and lives in San Salvador, El Salvador
Lucy Tomasino explores playful and sonorous expressions through a range of media. In her works, she transforms urban environments, creating immersive and thought-provoking experiences that aim to provoke reflection and challenge conventional visions of the world. She is known in particular for combining multimedia and public art. Her work has been presented in New York, Barcelona, Miami, and elsewhere. In 2024, she received the Prince Clause Seed Award in recognition of her practice.
Biography of the curator
Didier Morelli
Didier Morelli is an art historian, critic and interdisciplinary artist living between Montréal and Toronto. A FRQSC postdoctoral fellow (Concordia University / Canadian Centre for Architecture), he studies second-wave feminist performance and its subversion of urban spaces in the 1970s.
His writing has appeared in Art Journal, C Magazine, Esse, CBC Arts, The Drama Review (TDR), among others.
Partners
This exhibition is presented in partnership with Manif d’art 12 – The Québec City Biennial, Briser la glace / Splitting Ice, with the kind collaboration of the Goethe-Institute New York. It has been made possible thanks to the financial support of the Austrian Cultural Forum Ottawa and the Goethe-Institute Montréal.
The artists would like to thank the Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport of the Republic of Austria, ifa – Institut for Foreign Cultural Relations, YES Contemporary, Goethe-Institut New York, and Städtische Galerie Nordhorn.
