Pineapple Girl

The Pineapple Girl series began on the final and last harvest of pineapples in Hawaii on an industry scale in 2007, the same year this work was first made in Storrs, Connecticut and Ka‘ena Point Keawa’ula on O’ahu near Dillingham Airbase. The pineapple is a eulogized fruit that has a long history of being desired due to American agricultural corporations like Castle & Cooke and Dole Hawaii Pineapple Company (now Dole Food Co.) commercialization of the fruit. It took 146 years for the production of pineapples to end in Hawai’i, the remanence of this industry still remains along the Hawaiian landscapes marked with signs that read ‘for agricultural use only,’ posted by Monsanto Co. Kunia who now grows corn in those fields that are then shipped back across the Pacific to feed cattle.

3 Seasons does not welcome the viewer. Instead, the viewer experiences the uncomfortable position of waiting and maintaining a space throughout the changing landscape around them. Time passes and the viewer must stand unwavering through the transitions of seasons. Overseas in the Pacific there are only three seasons, not four like on the U.S. mainland. There is a gap, a missing fourth season. The absence signifies the gaps that exist in the memories of American history where they are currently being filled with documentation of first hand accounts stories and scholarship from a kānaka maoli perspective, and those who strive to help give back space for those voices.

Departing Tide, the waves move away from the shore instead of towards it. The leaving and not knowing when the next wave will return. Becoming a tourist in one’s own home. The shore is a kind of contact zone, a space where foreign interests arrive or depart, a point of aloha or combat.

Asuncion’s grandparents immigrated from the Philippines in the 1920’s to work on the Dole Pineapple plantations on O’ahu in Kahuku Village, where their father and his siblings were born and raised and still reside.

The two-channel video 3 Seasons & Departing Tide makes connections across territories and seas to speak to the diaspora experience of Asians and Pacific Islanders due to militarism, biopolitics, and globalization in terms of business and capital gain.

The Pineapple Girl isolated and separated as well as integrated as a part of the landscape that are both familiar and foreign simultaneously. They are a reflection of the multicultural background they possess and desire for belonging to place. In facing the tides that leave the shores of home, a kind of farewell.