CAROLINE GARCIA
Artist Statement
I am a culturally promiscuous, interdisciplinary artist working across performance, moving image, and installation through a hybridized aesthetic of cross-cultural movement, embodied research, and new media. My practice traverses a highly personalized aggregation of distinct systems that interlace ethnotraditional forms of knowledge (including botany, poetry, dance, and ceramics) with digital technologies (such as green screening, robotics, motion capture, extended realities (AR/VR), and 3D processes).
My practice is shaped by alterity. In my work, I center peripheral bodies by assuming the role of shape shifter—sliding into the gaps between cultures and experiences of otherness. Using found footage, archives, and artifacts, I digitally sample popular culture and colonial imagery to critically re-appropriate problematic narratives of cultural representation, further complicating them through cultural cannibalism. My practice involves a reimagining of forgotten choreographies and an intersectional approach to providing alternate ways of viewing images of the past that eschew classical myths. My motive is to create archipelagic constellations through my research to provide links between the past, present, and future.
I am committed to centering Indigenous protocol and addressing diasporic ontologies and its privileges. With this at the forefront, I experiment with digital technologies as a schema to out maneuver the hegemonic forces that oppress and as a tool to migrate gestures and ritual into speculative landscapes. My work embraces the rupture and the glitch as spaces to be filled with possibility and as strategies of resistance. Flirting with transgressions, I welcome the potency of rage and refusal as renditions of criticality for non-hegemonic bodies.
My current body of work resists assimilation tactics across the transpacific through a critical engagement with violence, grounded in a deeply personal excavation of grief and matrilineal loss. Citing a lineage of Guerrilleras (women resistance fighters) from the Philippine Islands, I propose unique renderings of survival strategies informed by elements of Indigenous Filipino culture and traditions rooted in ritual headhunting and martial arts. By initiating my own recuperation of violence, I create gateways for both self and collective actualization and preservation to engage with larger systemic themes of identity, immigration, and safety.