Caroline Garcia is a culturally promiscuous, performance maker. She works across live performance and video by borrowing tradition, sampling popular culture, translocating ritual, and blurring genres.
Garcia engages with a brown body politic that reimagines the complexities of her indigenous Filipino heritage and colonised ancestry. Her practice is shaped by alterity, cultural ambiguity and displacement, drawing from an abstraction of her dance practice in Afro-Latin and Caribbean, tribal South-East Asian and Polynesian methods of movement, as well as twerking aesthetics.
Primitive Nostalgia works with these ideas to proffer a video performance that sees the artist inserted into a range of dance performances, adopting costumes and moves so as to integrate into each scenario. A candid use of stereotypes and a chameleonic ability to assimilate allows to her to comment from within each cultural framework.
This work is present as part of the Virgin Australian Melbourne Fashion Festival Cultural Program Project Series presented by Buro 24/7.
Image: Carline Garcia Primitive Nostalgia 2015 (video still), courtesy the artist.
