​Shot at the Makiling Botanic Gardens (MBG), this hybrid project of ethnochoreography builds on the Tasaday hoax of the Marcos regime and the many choreographic fabrications by dance scholars passed as ethnographic notation to be later canonized into our dance traditions. Garcia’s project commemorates and critically reimagines the controversial Tasaday people while doubling as a work of fabulation and counter document to problematic myths of authenticity and ‘nation’ and the role of cultural production in assisting state power. Through his work, he asks: “How much of the narratives in our history have been fabricated and false? How come the remains of a former dictator now lies in a graveyard reserved for heroes? What influence have artist-choreographers contributed to such insidious fictions and assisted the state machinery over the decades?

 

Nestled on the legendary mountain sacred to many locals and pilgrims, the MBG shares the same ecosystem that prompted the Marcos administration to situate the National Arts Center in Los Banos. The facility was formally established as a training laboratory for scientific and silvicultural studies for the purpose of supporting professional instruction and many local and international researchers. Its public launch and development as a tourist attraction and recreation site coincided with the promulgation of the Marcosian New Society and ran parallel to its “beautification” projects and governmental efforts “to articulate [our] decidedly Filipino identity” while being “world-class” at the same time, in their bid for national development. Other than serving as a picturesque backdrop for and welcome site of bonding and recreation of the ‘happy’ and ‘content’ Filipino family of the New Society, the MBG had been poised as source of pride in our indigenous natural wealth. The instatement of the national botanic garden and the curation of local natural environment and endemic life forms conveniently fit the authoritarian scheme to fabricate the so-called deep structures. Garcia rigorously wields choreography and dance as a tool of critical discourse, interrogating discourses and fantasies of authenticity and nativism against the dense histories of the MBG and its ecology and wilderness that are both natural and fabricated at once.

​

Aaron Kaiser Garcia with Komunidad X​

Single-channel video projection with sounds

​

As part of Cristian Tablazon's Variations of the Fields at Curatorial Development Workshop Exhibition 

University of the Philippines Diliman Vargas Museum