Donna Garcia

Waking up at 3 am one morning, I noticed that the cable box next to the television was flashing like a strobe.  I know that the cable company monitors my viewing habits, but the visual aggressiveness of this data extraction felt particularly invasive. The following morning I started to do some research about surveillance capital and data mining.

I discovered that during the dotcom crash of the 1990’s Google discovered a surplus created by their users – our personal data.  It became so profitable for them to sell and so easy to obtain, that this by-product is now a primary revenue generator for Facebook / Instagram / Whats App, Amazon, Apple, Google and Tesla, among others. 

Governments everywhere аre allowing new surveillance technologies without regulations or safeguards. These new technologies mine our lives, without interruption, and are destabilizing democracy itself, further marginalizing those who already аre, and making data collectors or the Big Other, as described by Shoshana Zuboff in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the most powerful entities on the planet.

It seems like The Big Other wants every trace of human behavior to be translated into information, a commoditization of reality, transformed into behavioral data for profit. In 2015 an executive of a major technology company said, “Our goal is to create a nervous system throughout the planet that will merge an ever present sensoria onto human perception. We will informate the breeze blowing in the trees, the bees buzzing and even your breakfast conversations”.

However, humans аre not reliable when producing information and eventually experience fatigue. There have been discussions recently around hardwiring humans so that they can output more high quality data. Testing for this could come from medical trials where a chip is implanted into the brain to stabilize or enhance motor function for people with Parkinson’s Disease or traumatic brain injuries.  The Big Other knew as early as 2014 that the shadowy world of VR would not be infinitely profitable, because humans know what is “real”.  The key would be assimilating devices into the real world so covertly that they would eventually become part of us.

I decided to monitor myself (and my surroundings) using a convex security mirror, a tool often used to catch shoplifters in stores, before digital surveillance. I wanted to feel like I was being watched.  Ironically, when I was photographing in public spaces, security would often stop me or other people would get angry if they thought they were being photographed, yet they аre giving far more private information away, WILLINGLY, everyday. I marked extraction points on my images with XML style brackets to denote data pull. While creating these images I began to realize how integrated we already аre with our devices – assimilation is already here.

Remarkably, we don’t feel the cost of having our lives excavated online because data mining is a time-shift risk, the exploitation doesn’t have an impact until it is used against us, for example; during a period of social unrest when a seamless public transit system can turn into a prolific source of information for surveillance or when healthcare companies start denying coverage, based on data collected from apps connected to a sleep apnea machine or smart devices, like AppleWatch and Fitbit.

Big Data has now surpassed the value of crude oil as a commodity.  We give access to our information freely, via apps and social media. Our personal information is analyzed, sent back to us in a way that aims at control of our behavior and guarantees curated, reactive results for the people who can pay. We have only to look at social media campaigns aimed at influencing elections in Trinidad & Tobago, America in 2016 and Brexit, to see the results of our own data in action…we have become our own enemy.

Project Objective:

The objective of Indian Land For Sale is to try to restore what has been lost.

In 1830, the United States government, led by President Andrew Jackson, forcibly relocated native populations east of the Mississippi in order that white farmers could take over the land. The event led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, as well as the extinguishment of the native narratives from American history.

My series Indian Land For Sale, attempts to recreate the horror of this event from the perspective of the indigenous tribes. My images serve to replace what has been lost from official historical archives.

What really struck me is how efficient this extermination was in nearly wiping out an entire culture. In my research it was very difficult to find any primary documentation of these people in Georgia. The Atlanta History Center has little information on the Trail of Tears or indigenous people as a whole and when I submitted a request to their archives, I was told that there was no documentation on file relating to native people or their land.

Project Statement:

In 1830 the Indian Removal Act was enacted.

President Jackson declared that Indian removal would "…Incalculably strengthen the southwestern frontier. Clearing Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi of their Indian populations would enable those states to advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power."

Systematic hunts were made to force indigenous people from their ancestral land.

A Georgia volunteer, later a Colonel in the Confederate service, said, “‘I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by the thousands, but the Indian removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”

Following the signing of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 the American government began forcibly relocating East Coast tribes across the Mississippi. The removal included many members of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations from their homelands to “Indian Territory” in eastern sections of the present-day Oklahoma. It was a 1,000-mile walk and took 116 days from Georgia, walking all day and only being allowed to stop at night to bury their dead.

Between the years of 1830-1838, 100,00 indigenous people were “removed” from their ancestral lands. Although, no one is sure the exact number, approximately 21,700 Muscogee and approximately 16,500 Cherokee were removed by 1831.

Not all indigenous people left in 1830, specifically the Cherokee. Many stayed, thinking that they would be allowed to live peacefully or have the ability to fight back (actually winning several legal battles against the removal order). However, the Georgia State government and Andrew Jackson, had plans for their land. Flyers began to circulate hailing “Indian Land For Sale”. White farmers flocked in droves to auctions of indigenous, ancestral land that was still, up to 1838, being occupied by its native people.

It was in 1838 that 7,000 US soldiers in Georgia enforced a final evacuation. The Cherokee, Creek, Shawnee and Choctaw villages were invaded and the people were forced to leave, at gunpoint, with only the clothing on their backs.

For the few who resisted, approximately 1,800, died while imprisoned in internment camps for refusing to leave.

Historians such as David Stannard and Barbara Mann have noted that the army deliberately routed the march of the Cherokee to pass through areas of known cholera epidemics, such as Vicksburg. Stannard estimates that during the forced removal from their homelands, 8000 Cherokee died, about half the total population. Half of the Choctaw nation was wiped out and 1 in 4 Creek.

A Cherokee survivor of the trail told her granddaughter, “The winter was very harsh and many of us no longer had shoes. Our feet froze and burst, as we left bloody footprints in the snow. We were not allowed to stop to bury our dead. Many mothers carried their dead children, miles, until we stopped at nightfall. All night you could only hear digging.”

The deportation of indigenous tribes along the Trail of Tears was an act of genocide that has been conveniently forgotten today. On March 27, 2020, the federal government of the United States revoked reservation designation for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe and has removed their 300 acres of ancestral land on Cape Cod from federal trust. This recent government land grab is raising grave concerns among indigenous advocacy groups across the country that all tribes could now be at risk – again.

Midnight Mythology elaborates on the idea of pulling away from a cultural grand narrative and towards a state of becoming and potential. Moving away from the isness of society to see and feel the potential in ourselves, but also to see the potential in others through empathy, because to see the other, is to see ourselves. It modulates against a fixed self and against the very nature of photography, which is a type of consciousness that has a fixed point, a frame that represents a dominant, knowing conscious.  

Self-portraiture with motion and the idea of animism provide an indication of the other in this work, a threat to the fixed position. It is a surplus threat to the perpetuity of the modern day superstructure in defining elements like gender. Otherness is much more because it is grounded in being and is non-binary in nature.  I am able to slip outside of the rigidity of the group by creating these unstable images in which the subject operates through two points, in a kind of in-between, liminal space.  In doing so, my pictures illustrate a destabilization from the strict, scientific representation that limits them and bring them into a state that frees the full potential of the subject.

This work reveals the self as a stronger potential that does not correlate with a bounded social order and my subjects don’t abide by rules. There is a strong presence of future and coming into being, which allows my images to pull the viewer forward through recognition and interpretation, into a new sovereignty and expanded possibility. Midnight Mythology is indicative of change and represents the trace of what is coming. It shows a semiotic dislocation that has been organically reconstructed in a way that forces the viewer to consider a transition from the limitations of constructed cultural ideals and towards the authenticity of an unbounded self.

Undark: The Radium Girls is inspired by a group of women in the 1920’s who made their living painting glow-in-the-dark faces onto watches and clocks with a chemical called Radium.  When these women began to display the horrific side effects of becoming radioactive, no one cared.

Radiation began to literally devour their bodies from the inside out, honeycombing their bones.  The moment a girl knew that she had Radium poisoning was when catching sight of herself in a mirror in the middle of the night.  Instead of seeing her reflection, there was a shining, unnatural luminosity coming deep from within her - she was now a “ghost girl”.

The “lip dip” was the instructed method for applying Radium– brush to mouth.

It was no surprise that the first symptoms of toxicity were teeth falling out, mouth ulcers, massive tumors of the face, disintegrating bones, and constant internal hemorrhaging, particular from the jaw. 

All that they were given to ease their suffering was aspirin, for pain and gauze, to stem the bleeding.  There was no help and no place to run, where the green glow could not follow.

Beyond documenting their story, Undark: The Radium Girls, seeks to reflect a greater truth, which is that these women were isolated and ignored. This series takes the perspective of metaphorically viewing the cycle of becoming a “ghost girl”, and the intimate degradation, internally and externally, which slowly altered their reality. 

My images are not meant as reportage but created to transcend what they actually are and become empathic historical recreations in a Fine Art narrative. They combine tangible and empirical reality with my profound reaction to it.

Through the use of dark ambiguity and abstraction, I seek to add a lyrical quality to this work, which speaks in a way that gives the subject a voice in the present; something they did not have in the past.

They plunge to the bottom of the frozen sea, holding their breath, blinded by the murky abyss, searching not only for pearls, octopi or abalone, but also for freedom.

What would happen if their line were to break? Would the men comfortably sitting above in their boats, gleefully singing songs, try to save them? It doesn’t matter. The Japanese Ama defy the ridged confines of gender expectations because they are driven by a unified sense of purpose - to live free.

For the Ama or “women of the sea”, their faith is not in men but in nature. After all, the sea itself is an intoxicating female entity. Its creatures are the Ama’s allies. Their destinies are woven together like a fluid tapestry.

As the divers rise back to the surface and slowly exhale, the bay rings with the whistling echoes of their gentle gasp, and with it, reverberations of strength, autonomy, courage, stamina, and beauty.

The Ama are inspirational to me, as an artist and a woman, for many reasons, but foremost because what they did was just what they had to do, regardless of risk or reward. Even more remarkable to me is how they did it; breaking traditional rules within the confines of an existing system and still preserving their individual authenticity along with the connection to their culture.

My series, Whistling Echoes, explores the mythology of these women. Through the use of metaphor and symbolism, my visual interpretation explores the relationship that these women had to the sea and it’s creatures and how it not only shaped their destiny but also allowed them to live free.

We quietly go through life waging our own personal battles.  Some are won and some lost.  A constant fight against our history, our faith, our nature and corrupted archetypes.

In the process we become forged by conflict in hopes of achieving some kind of peace or final redemption. The soul is pierced by the thorns of self-sacrifice and bleeds in order to live. With every perceived advancement, we lose who we are and become fragmented versions of ourselves.

Throughout this life, the soul waits for the spirit to find the truth that will set it free. Truth that is independent of opinion and intolerant of error. That authenticity that has been in us from the day that we were born, but lost in conformation, will finally be found. We will see again and the journey will be done. Through birth to death to rebirth, who we are will find us again. The soul will be reconciled, its wait will be over, we will be free and the angles will sing.

I have captured this truth throughout the haunted landscapes of the rural South. Images filled with a sense of somber tension between a dark history, a culture rooted in religious epitome and the romanticized nostalgia of the past. It is important work for us to view today, as it speaks to the results of a fragmented culture, one that still exists and is becoming more fragmented than whole.

International Photography Award (IPA) Winner 2017.

Category: Fine Art Abstract (non-professional).

Award: Honorable Mention.

Donna Garcia’s work, whether city, rural and surrealist, may be unconnected by subject, yet а connected by style, presenting moments of epiphany and transition in everyday life.

For Example, in Restaurant 69, from her series City Walks  (2017) a transcendent dimension is revealed through her own form of “lyrical documentary,” addressing a moment of change when one can see things as they really are, discovering an indisputable truth. This work illustrates how inner life manifests itself in various elements and composites of external life, especially in those, sometimes, imperceptible surface details that form an essential part of the artist’s photo treatment.

She often utilizes metaphor and mythology to covey a past-present narrative, integrating environment with a sense of mystery that gives the viewer a feeling that something is not quite right.

Prague, my mother’s home.

Habitat is a photographic collaboration featuring the residents of AWARE Wildlife Center. AWARE rehabilitates Georgia’s injured and orphaned native wild animals and educates the community about peaceful coexistence. It focuses on wildlife in the Southeast (specifically Georgia) and its habitat, which is slowly disappearing due to urban sprawl. Artists Virginia Jackson Carr and Donna Garcia, explore how these residents adapt and continue to inspire humans through their rehabilitation process and beyond.

Portraits.