Caroline Garcia

“Choose Your Fighter” (2020). VR video, 360-degree video, color, sound; 3:24 mins. To view this work in VR/360, visit youtu.be/QMUj4e9s2dU. “Choose Your Fighter” is a virtual reality performance featuring an indigenous Filipino blowgun, known as a “sumpit.” Through an effort to “outsource the matriarchy” online, this video work addresses grief for my late mother. It is one component of a larger body of performance installations. My thesis is an attempt to re-indigenize grief from my mother's recent passing by adopting the indigenous practice of headhunting as an embodied experiment, whereby I recast myself as the Headhunter on a headless headhunt. This work is a reparative measure to contend with the diasporic and post-colonial grief that accompanies the loss of a mother. It reflects on Saidiya Hartman's literature, whereby she writes: "to lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider, an alien."