Tropical Hypeisms
13 - 16 January 2016
This performance was developed with support of the NAVA NSW Artists’ Grant
Choreographer / Performer: Caroline Garcia
Sound Composer: Mei Saraswati
Lighting Designer: Amber Silk
Costume: Matthew Stegh
Outside Eyes: Latai Taumoepeau, Linda Luke & Katrina Douglas
Tropical Hypeisms confronts the hegemonic tropicalisation of portrayals of women of colour through a hybridised aesthetic of cross-cultural dance, ritual practice, new media and colonial imagery. It delivers the promise of tropical paradise, in its intoxicating colours, sounds, movement and hospitality, and seeks to expose the inextricable taste for the tropics - a taste that is consumed and orchestrated in mainstream media and also forged in colonial ideologies, cemented in archival images that now seem a distant reality.
In this new solo work, Caroline adopts the role of shape shifter, sliding into the gaps between cultures, experiences of tropical otherness and timeless clichés of exotic femininity. She has joined forces with musician and sound artist, Mei Saraswati (Perth, WA) for her soulful frequencies and balmy RnB aesthetics in order to create a soundscape that transports Beyoncé, FKA twigs and Kelis through a tribal portal, into the recesses of the equator.
Exhibition History: Asiatopa at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (2017); Firstdraft, Art Month Sydney, PACT (all 2016)
Image Credit: Photography by Dexter Cornelius, courtesy of PACT Centre for Emerging Artists