Rituals of Love: KUBORAUM, ASIANDOPEBOYS and the Geography of Transformation
Part performance, part ritual, part musical anthropology, Ocean Cage emerged from Tianzhuo Chen and collaborator Siko Setyanto's research into the whaling communities of Lamalera, Indonesia. Yet what interested Chen was never documentation. Instead, he became fascinated by a worldview where life and death, violence and gratitude, human and non-human existence remain fundamentally intertwined.
"The whale is prey, but also ancestor, gift from God and sacrifice," Chen explains. "What touched me wasn't simply the ritual itself, but the fact that life and death weren't separated."
The result is a work suspended between reverence and discomfort. Traditional Indonesian cosmologies collide with electronic music, experimental performance, club culture, and contemporary mythology. Ancient structures are neither preserved nor abandoned; they are transformed.
For Chen, ritual and rave culture are far less distant than they appear. "I think ritual and rave already share the same structure," he says.
That collision between ancestral knowledge and contemporary experience runs throughout the entire Venice program. The performances feel simultaneously ancient and futuristic, existing somewhere between ceremony, theatre, concert, hallucination, and collective meditation.
Chen's accompanying performance, Moyang 先祖 & Seaman 漁師, extends this exploration even further. Through figures such as the Ancestor, Fisherman, and Sun Moon God, the work navigates a landscape where memory, fiction, spirituality, and imagination become inseparable.
"Today we spend so much time asking what we can learn from AI," Chen says. "But what if we looked back and asked what we could learn from our ancestors?"
For KUBORAUM founders Sergio Eusebi and Livio Graziottin, the attraction to ASIANDOPEBOYS was immediate.
"The first time we saw an ASIANDOPEBOYS performance on video, we literally went crazy," Eusebi recalls. "We became obsessed."
What struck them wasn't simply the visual intensity of the work but its refusal to separate aesthetics from ethics, spirituality from politics, beauty from community.
"It was powerful, immersive, beautiful, and raw all at once," he says. "Spiritual and punk at the same time. Contemporary, futuristic and ancient. Traditional and experimental."
This collapse of categories mirrors KUBORAUM's own philosophy. Since its inception, the project has existed somewhere between fashion label, art collective, performance platform, design studio, and cultural community. The eyewear itself functions less as an accessory than as what the founders describe as a "mask", not something that conceals identity but something that amplifies it.
That same philosophy extends naturally into KUBORAUM Editions, the group's vinyl-focused publishing platform. Every release is treated as an artist edition, existing simultaneously as music, object, archive, and cultural artifact.
In an era increasingly dominated by digital consumption, Ocean Cage arrives as something stubbornly physical: a gatefold vinyl featuring a 16-page booklet filled with photographs, texts, sketches, storyboards, and artworks documenting the project's evolution.
"We believe an object can become a container of culture," says Eusebi. "Collecting an object is also a way of belonging to it."
For KUBORAUM, the tactile experience remains inseparable from the music itself. Sound exists alongside paper stock, typography, photography, texture, and design. The record becomes less a product and more a portable world.
This idea of world-building extends beyond the object itself. Both ASIANDOPEBOYS and KUBORAUM operate through networks of collaboration that stretch across continents, connecting Berlin, Indonesia, China, Italy, and countless other cultural geographies.
Travel, in this sense, becomes more than movement. It becomes methodology.
The title of KUBORAUM’s event series, We Travel To Know Our Own Geography, suggests that understanding ourselves requires first encountering others. "Through encountering the Other, we ultimately come to know ourselves more deeply," Eusebi explains. It is perhaps here that the project's relationship to love becomes most visible.
Not romantic love. Something larger.
A form of collective responsibility. A willingness to remain vulnerable to transformation. A belief that identity is never fixed but constantly evolving through encounter, movement, ritual, and exchange.
For Chen, love appears not as desire but as interdependence.
For KUBORAUM, it becomes an active choice.
In Venice, surrounded by art world openings, collectors, curators, and cultural tourism,the festival offered something increasingly rare: a reminder that performance can still function as ritual, that music can still transform perception, and that travel can still be a tool for understanding who we are.
Or perhaps, who we might become.
