Anna Ehrenstein and Sunny Pfalzer with Lucy Tomasino and Alexa Evangelista

Cripto Sirenas

Wetness as resistance, futurism as ritual.

Description of the exhibition

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.

Artists' biographies

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 integral to their practice because they offer time and space to reflect and unlearn collectively. Pfalzer’s work has been presented in New York, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich, Lisbon, and Chicago.

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. Confronting censorship and state persecution, Evangelista insists on alternative modes of existence. They have undertaken residencies in Nicaragua and Germany, shown work 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. Her works transform urban environments, creating immersive and thought-provoking experiences that aim to provoke reflection and challenge conventional visions of the world. She is particularly known 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.

Practical Information

Joliette Art Museum

• Address: 1456 Rue de Lanaudière, Joliette
• Parking: On-site / nearby public parking
• Transit: Accessible via regional buses from Montréal & Lanaudière
• Accessibility: Fully accessible museum