In Acts of Service, Keith Lafuente examines the many connotations of “service” — sexual, military, culinary, religious, and altruistic — through a carnivalesque installation of kinetic and static sculptures.Animated stuffed fabric figures perform exchanges of labor and desire: a go-go boy waiter serves on top of a table, and a sailor pole dances on a pig spit for a voyeuristic audience including tarsiers and turtles. Their automation is a cycle, a structure visible to the audience but not to the characters in their own world.
Lafuente’s work is deeply informed by Filipino hospitality traditions and the global inequities of labor shaped by colonial history. His references to kink culture further complicate notions of what society deems empowering, degrading, or beautiful.