Open Call: Caroline Garcia

The Headless Headhunt is a performance installation, an act of mourning, and a personal report on what it means to lose your mother. In this work, Garcia adopts the Indigenous practice of headhunting from the Philippines with the motivation to process grief. According to Indigenous Ilongot elders from Northern Luzon, profound rage born from grief can compel one to cut off human heads. Garcia’s work serves as an arena to cultivate sources of knowledge and skills called for in a potential headhunt. As research becomes embodied, theories become practice, and training becomes a process of discovery. In translating headhunting customs through her own physical and psychological movements derived from Filipino Martial Arts (FMA), collaborative work with the Chrysalis Kali Collective that she trains with, botany, ceramics, and an augmented reality (AR) app, Garcia creates a place to carry her own diasporic and postcolonial grief that has accompanied her mother’s passing. By embracing grief’s rage, she attempts to illuminate its potency as a critical and reparative tool, useful for marginalized communities. In the return of grief to Indigenous foundations, Garcia proposes that to be “headless” in this sense is to be diasporic, illegible, and uncontained, existing as a future iteration of the past—a living afterlife.