Caroline Garcia's residency at Recess is part of a five-year reexamination of the narratives around the Indigenous practice of headhunting in the Philippine Islands. The artist is interested in symbolically recuperating headhunting’s role as a psycho-spiritual ritual for processing and dissipating profound personal grief, whilst extending this notion of grief to the burdened histories of colonial erasure that persist in our present day. Garcia has activated the gallery with an evolving installation made of reimagined weapons based on period and improvised weaponry traditionally used in headhunting expeditions, (such as daggers, swords, axes, spears, etc.) and self-defense training tools. Through interactive design sessions with gallery visitors, tese weapons have undergone a process of re-rendering through an intersectional feminist and diasporic intervention, decoupling the objects from hyper-masculinized, patriarchal affiliations.

Drop by for the I Woke Up and Chose Violence's Closing Celebration and view the weapons that have been designed during the session and learn how they are contextualized within Garcia’s practice. This event will showcase live self-defense and martial arts demos by project collaborators as well as invited guests and collectives, and more!

Registration is strongly encouraged. Visitors are invited to engage with the store on a first-come first-served basis—with a limited number of people admitted at a time.

I Woke Up and Chose Violence is part of Recess’s program, Session, which invites artists to use Recess’s public platform to combine productive studio space with dynamic exhibition opportunities. Sessions remain open to the public from the first day of the artist's project through the last, encouraging sustained dialogue between artists and audiences. Due to the process-based nature of Session, projects undergo constant revision and the above proposal is subject to change.