ARTISTS TO KNOW: CAROLINE GARCIA
Caroline Garcia
Born in Sydney, Australia and now based in Brooklyn, NY, Caroline Garcia is a culturally promiscuous, interdisciplinary artist of Filipinx descent. She works across performance, video, and installation while exploring themes of botany, martial arts, pop culture, dance, virtual reality, augmented reality, and more. For The Shed’s Open Call exhibition, Caroline’s installation The Headless Headhunt adopts the Indigenous practice of headhunting from the Philippines with the motivation to process grief.
Studio Portrait (2017) by Alex Wisser
Courtesy of Parramatta Artists Studios
SHEER: Tell us a little bit about yourself.
CAROLINE GARCIA: I’m from Sydney Australia, the Gadigal lands apart of the Eora nation. I moved to New York for grad school in 2018 and now I’m based in Brooklyn. I identify as Filipina-Australian and I’m an interdisciplinary artist covering video, installation and performance.
SHEER: How do you approach selecting the themes of your art?
CG: Themes are from my own experience. How on earth can you make art from an experience you don’t know about? So that’s really important to me. A lot of it also comes from narratives from my own life whether it be race or ethnicity or certain events such as grief or loss that came from my mother’s passing and the implications this had on my life. I explore how I can translate certain ideas through knowledge or skills or mythologies from the Philippines and also how I exist as a Filipina diasporic postcolonial artist and how that can be intersected with the media that I’m interested in.
I’ve always been influenced by popular culture and that was the only way I was able to see my likeness in Australia being Asian, but brown Asian which has completely different politics. Australia has a very white colonial history that’s taken over it’s blackness. So this whiteness has dictated what narratives have taken over.
There’s a way of weaving the personal with the ancestral in my work and I don’t think they completely align but are parallel. I am always very conscious of differentiating them so that I don’t misappropriate.
Queen of the Carabao (video still), 2018, two-channel digital video, color, sound, 30:00 mins
Choose Your Fighter (video still), 2020, virtual reality / 360-degree video, color, sound, 3:24 mins
SHEER: You describe yourself as "culturally promiscuous." What do you mean by that?
CG: I use culturally promiscuous to refer to the promiscuous array of cultures that make up the Philippines. There are over 170 ethno-linguistic groups, there are over 7,000 islands situated in the Pacific Ocean. There have been many waves of colonization and attempts at colonization and various spirituality systems and religions and all of this informs my identity and how I navigate the world and that comes through in my art practice as well. That is inherent to Filipinx identity.
SHEER: Your work is influenced by a wide variety of topics from martial arts to botany to robotics to VR. What are the sources of these inspirations and how do you approach connecting these dots?
CG: I don’t like to be didactic in my work. I don’t like to teach anything so explicitly to what someone can learn or gain from the work. I like to keep things open to what people can gain or abstract from my work which allows for me to insert some humor and speaks to a sort of ambiguity and loss that happens in my own life and in my own culture. I’m always trying to fill in the gaps. I always refer to myself as being a glitch of a Filipina because of how I am a Filipina that’s broken down in so many ways. I’m making information up to fill in the gaps. I have knowledge being passed down that I have to decode or encode. So what I present to you is a remixed version which comes from my location and geography and what I had available to me and piecing the puzzle together and never quite having a finished puzzle. This lends itself to the kinds of expression that I’ve always been attracted to and that has been accessible to me. A mish mash of Indigenous mythologies and technologies and cultures and histories but parsed with things I have access to now and can manipulate.
Dance movement has always been a part of my practice and I’ve now picked up martial arts. With new media and technology that came from my education and schooling since I have a background in photography. I’ve taught myself dance practices through Youtube which has inspired me to want to learn how to do other things like green screen technologies and that led to VR (virtual reality) and 360 video and AR (augmented reality). I’ve always been able to have a privileged position in environments that can support the kind of work that I make. I just finished a tech residency that helped shape the AR component.
For botany, right now I’m growing arrow poison and this came from traveling in the Philippines and seeing these shows of cultural tourism. I’m Filipina but felt like I was still exercising the colonial gaze on the native peoples as this diasporic Filipina. I remember seeing this show and there was a demonstration with a blowgun, or sumpit in Tagalog, that shoots darts. I had some connections to people who worked with Indigenous communities and I was given a blowgun from an Indigenous elder and I asked “How do you use this?” and he’s like, “You just blow into it” haha. I started using that in my practice as a martial arts tool or a tool for hunting which is ancient technology. This gave me a new exploration for my piece at The Shed. I’m using the arrow poisoning for the darts from the blowgun.
“I always refer to myself as being a glitch of a Filipina because of how I am a Filipina that’s broken down in so many ways. I’m making information up to fill in the gaps. I have knowledge being passed down that I have to decode or encode. So what I present to you is a remixed version which comes from my location and geography and what I had available to me and piecing the puzzle together and never quite having a finished puzzle.”
The Good Neighbor, 2018, series of 4 photographs (in collaboration with Sophie Barbasch)
Imperial Reminiscence (video still), 2018, single-channel digital video, color, sound, 10:15 mins
SHEER: Tell us a little bit more about your latest commission for The Shed's Open Call, The Headless Headhunt. What was that creative process like for you?
CG: I like to come up with my own personal systems in my head using all of these technologies and disciplines involving sculptural installation, ceramics, botany, video, performance, green screening, sexual engagement, and augmented reality. The foundations of it all are to explore grief. Headhunting as a motivation to process grief potentially to heal, but not necessarily, just to help process. This comes from Indigenous rationale, but not exclusive to the Ilongot people from Northern Luzon in the Philippines.
I came across the work of Latinx anthropologist Renato Rosaldo through bell hooks who quoted his essay “Imperial Nostalgia”. He did a lot of field studies in the Philippines and wrote an essay titled “Grief of the Headhunters Rage.” His writing explores headhunting as a way to relieve oneself of grief and the cultural forces of emotions like rage and anger and contextualizes them which was interesting to meet death with death and violence with violence. But it’s not about exchange theory or a head for a head. I found this hard to comprehend and that was me having to confront my conditioning as a postcolonial person in Western thinking and ideologies. Rosaldo is trying to decipher this practice while speaking with these communities and the elder just laughs and says “You either get it or you don’t.”
There are some things you can’t understand or penetrate psychologically, or emotionally, or intellectually. So my installation is made of bullet-proof materials like wood and polycarbonate (an acrylic used in banks and schools), metal, and ceramics. It’s about this idea of layering to make things bullet resistant and that concept comes through in materiality. It’s really about me going through this process of embodying this research of headhunting and presenting it in different ways through the installation as a whole.
Also thinking about individual healing and going through losing my mother, tying this personal event with this diasporic experience and also thinking about loss of the matriarchy as a real collective experience especially living in such a patriarchal culture and that being imposed by colonialism. This isn’t just unique to me but inviting the women’s martial arts collective I train with for the installation and co-authoring an Orasyon together which is a prayer recited before battle or war and makes you invincible so you can withstand bullets and be stronger and faster. We took these prayers written by instructors and fighters and made it our own in response to what is occurring in the world today especially for AAPI women.
I filmed with a body camera of myself boxing and green screened into footage of a mantis shrimp which punches it’s predator and its prey and is considered a ballistic movement. I know, it’s too much! Haha. I’ve taken all of these metaphors of impenetrability and put them alongside grief to create a duality between protection and self defense. That speaks to this nonlinear experience of grief where it comes at you and you deal with it but it never ends.
SHEER: To be headless in the context of your work is "...existing as a future iteration of the past- a living afterlife." Such a beautiful and eloquent description. How do you navigate expressing these two worlds/cultures, the native and the diaspora, in your art?
CG: To be headless in my work refers to two things. Since this installation is about the experience of losing my mother, I think of myself as a living memorial of her, hence being “a future iteration of the past - a living afterlife.” Though I grieve the matriarchy, I am her DNA memorialized, I’m an etching of her image, her histories, her culture - what was already embedded and what was shared.
To be headless also is an experience of being diasporic. It’s about existing as a glitch of your ancestry, it’s about being the colonizer and the colonized, it’s about non-belonging, it’s about flirting with transgressions but (hopefully) not betraying your culture, it’s about being illegible, disparate, uncontained, and embracing how convoluted the diasporic experience is.
SHEER: What does a path to liberation for marginalized folks look like to you and how is your art a testament to that?
CG: Well, I think that the path to liberation for marginalised folks is not about having to explain our existence or our experiences for the purpose of being made sense of or understood. I’m not sure if this answers your question, but it’s not about simplifying, editing, comparing, or academicizing ourselves in order to be considered as legitimate in this world. To quote an Ilongot elder and fierce headhunter, “you either understand, or you don’t."
I think my art does that by the highly personalized aggregation of systems I try to create in my work through different media, and the way in which I work through a composition of various conceptual layers in one piece. I’m not sure if this is successful as such, but it’s certainly an attempt to mirror this as an exercise of resistance.
“To be headless also is an experience of being diasporic. It’s about existing as a glitch of your ancestry, it’s about being the colonizer and the colonized, it’s about non-belonging, it’s about flirting with transgressions but (hopefully) not betraying your culture, it’s about being illegible, disparate, uncontained, and embracing how convoluted the diasporic experience is.”
SHEER: What lasting impact would you like your art to leave on the world?
CG: I don’t think I can really testify to what a lasting impact would be for me, but I hope to leave an emotional residue in the way in which people experience my work - whether that be through humor, confusion, or shock for instance. I also hope that the work that I am making can contribute to the discourse surrounding new media technologies (which is very precarious territory) and critical race theory - even to a small degree.
