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.
Eine Zusammenarbeit des MFA-Studiengangs «Public Art and New Artistic Strategies» der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Fakultät Kunst und Gestaltung mit der ACC Galerie Weimar. Vortrag in englischer Sprache.
Montag, 4.Juli 2022