ISLE OF THE BLESSED (2021)
Duty-Free Paradise | Isle of the Blessed is a 40-minute performance in three parts, created in the form of a post-colonial Filipinx epic.
The project Duty-Free Paradise (2020) uses transmedia storytelling as a tool to visually create a dialogue to examine the many connections and dangers around eco-tourism, biopolitics, and militarism throughout American history and in Hawai’i; where Asuncion’s grandparents immigrated to from the Philippines in the 1920’s to work on the sugarcane plantations on Oahu.
Isle of the blessed explores the contradictions between perceptions and realities of island life as a constructed paradise through American pop culture, down to the flora and fauna, It aims to create an anti-colonial perspective on the romanticization and fetishization of ‘paradise’ and critiques colonial and racist systems built upon the white supremacy and imperialism that overthrew The Hawaiian sovereignty. This work critiques the commodification of Hawai’i as an escape to an idealized paradise for tourists from overseas as well as the U.S. ‘mainland’. These videos and performances address the ways eco-tourism advertising mystifies neoliberal economic and political programs through the exploitation of Hawai’i’s resources, land, and Kānaka Maoli indigenous to the islands.
The performance ends with the birdsong of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō last heard throughout the Hawai’i mountains in 1987, the same year Asuncion’s grandmother died from heat stroke in her garden in Kahuku Village, former sugar plantation housing.
Watch the Live-stream Documentation here.
