Salawaki: The Artist Who Isn't Sure You're Human

What if folklore never disappeared — it simply moved online? Mirjam Dalire, aka Salawaki, is a Filipino multidisciplinary artist working with digital media, CGI, and internet culture. Her practice exists somewhere between myth and online performance. Her avatars, CAPTCHAs, and screen recordings become not just technological elements, but new folkloric creatures — strange, humorous, and unsettling proof that we're still here. Mirjam Dalire lives and works on the island of Siquijor in the Philippines — a place steeped in legends about invisible forces and magical practices. Her interest, however, is not in the exoticization of local myth, but in how similar mechanisms of belief and mistrust are emerging online today. While a spirit might once have inhabited a tree or a house, it can now appear in an avatar. Her works transform the online environment into a space of new mythmaking. At the center of this universe is Salawaki, the artist's digital persona and alter ego. In "Proof of Salawaki," she appears as a virtual double, whose presence she records through documentation, augmented reality, screen recording, and digital performance. Behind this almost playful form lies a very specific question: can an avatar become a way to be present where the physical body cannot always reach? For Mirjam Dalire, this is also connected to her experience as a Filipino artist, whose mobility in the global art system is limited by visas, borders, and unequal access. Salawaki is not just a mask, but a way to declare one's presence. In "Captcha: The Musical," the artist addresses another everyday digital ritual: the "I'm not a robot" verification. What's usually perceived as a technical formality is transformed by Mirjam Dalire into an absurdist musical episode about the need to repeatedly prove one's humanity to a machine. Through her works, the artist speaks of a world where the virtual can no longer be separated from the real. Her digital folklore is born not in a village legend, but in an interface and in a screen recording. And in this world, proof of existence can be found not in a passport or a body, but in an avatar or a trace of Salawaki flickering on the screen. What counts as presence once our digital doubles begin to live lives of their own?