Margarita Garcia
A 3rd generation academic, born on the South Side of Chicago, Margarita was raised in the hallways of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, where she played chess with arch-conservatives such as Milton Friedman and hid messages to her dolls in the drawers of the first Chicago Stock Exchange. A thoroughly liberal education at the Laboratory Schools (during which she freelanced as a hip-hop photojournalist and photo edited the book Bomb the Suburbs (written by fellow UHigh graduate William 'Upski' Wimsatt) which, despite it's historical flaws was noticed by Cornell West and the Nation of Islam) led her to enroll at Brown University, where she majored in political activism and post colonial history, studying under Professors Lewis Gordon, Anani Dzidzienyo and serving as a minority peer counselor and studying social movements and community developments with the unconventional methods of Bill Calhoun. She completed an Honors Thesis, under Professor Douglas Cope on revolutionary women's movements in the Philippines, researching in the original Spanish in the Archive of the Indies a couple of decades ago and then promptly went to work for the dark side, starting her own dot.com and ending up in NYC as the senior project manager of IBM's sectors and solutions for website development before the champagne ran out during the dot.com crash. During 9/11 her activist instincts were reactivated by the impending war and she photoedited the book "Another World Is Possible" with contributions from Noam Chomsky, Arundahti Roy and Sebastiao Salgado. This led to her participation in the founding a left wing youth organization (Ugnayan) for social justice and volunteering with Damayan Migrant Workers association - and back to her family roots in the Philippines. Winner of a Fullbright Grant in the Arts, she spent 4 years in the Philippines on a remote island in the middle of the South Pacific, helping to found an indigenous youth arts association which still exists and has been recognized by the UN. From her lighthouse base, she applied to art school in Europe and the US, eventually deciding on completing her MFA at the Bauhaus University Weimar, in the program Art in Public Space. After finishing, she completed a major piece on the US/Mexico Border wall, entitled Re/flecting the Border, which widely seen and was featured in Kunst Forum and oddly in the Mc Millan Encyclopedia in the chapter Human Geography. She is currently slow-walking her doctoral thesis (also at the Bauhaus) due to the Covid-19 crisis and her call back to direct action in solidarity with the global protests on race in 2021 and serving as a point person for discrimination for the city, as well as teaching on issues of diversity, race and feminism in the University.
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Papers by Margarita Garcia
In Germany discussions of Heimat can be problematized by the legacies of World War II and may operate as thinly disguised forms of racism and sexism masquerading as cultural preservation. Thus, this provocative subject can serve as fertile ground from which to address the contemporary reality of international migration and women’s presence outside the domestic sphere in the hopes of questioning outdated modalities of authenticity and creating public dialogues that suggest a more inclusive, hybrid society.
These themes were explored in a series of loosely related artistic experiments, aimed at examining the construction of personal and communal beliefs around the ideas of homeland and being-at-home. Methods of experimentation included elements of photography, leveraging Internet platforms to do research and conduct surveys, personal interviews, performances and historical re-enactment and participatory artwork. This research eventually led to the development of a tangential body of work connected by a concern with the theme of finding home in the public space.
The thesis was written in two phases and has two main parts: chapters 1-4 are a formal, theoretical exploration of the theme. They lay the groundwork for chapters 5- 6, which are written informally as a personal reflection. The final chapters hold a contextual art survey of work relevant to the work produced for this thesis as well as a reflection and documentation of the execution of the experiments and final work produced as a part of this practice based thesis.
The final outcome for this thesis took the form of a participatory artwork, entitled KunstPost: Gruß aus Weimar which allowed the public to send postcard images of historical re-enactments of classical Weimar figures to homes around the world in the hopes of enlarging the scope of what is familiar and starting conversations.
Books by Margarita Garcia
In Germany discussions of Heimat can be problematized by the legacies of World War II and may operate as thinly disguised forms of racism and sexism masquerading as cultural preservation. Thus, this provocative subject can serve as fertile ground from which to address the contemporary reality of international migration and women’s presence outside the domestic sphere in the hopes of questioning outdated modalities of authenticity and creating public dialogues that suggest a more inclusive, hybrid society.
These themes were explored in a series of loosely related artistic experiments, aimed at examining the construction of personal and communal beliefs around the ideas of homeland and being-at-home. Methods of experimentation included elements of photography, leveraging Internet platforms to do research and conduct surveys, personal interviews, performances and historical re-enactment and participatory artwork. This research eventually led to the development of a tangential body of work connected by a concern with the theme of finding home in the public space.
The thesis was written in two phases and has two main parts: chapters 1-4 are a formal, theoretical exploration of the theme. They lay the groundwork for chapters 5- 6, which are written informally as a personal reflection. The final chapters hold a contextual art survey of work relevant to the work produced for this thesis as well as a reflection and documentation of the execution of the experiments and final work produced as a part of this practice based thesis.
The final outcome for this thesis took the form of a participatory artwork, entitled KunstPost: Gruß aus Weimar which allowed the public to send postcard images of historical re-enactments of classical Weimar figures to homes around the world in the hopes of enlarging the scope of what is familiar and starting conversations.