The Monument Series
Karina Raquel Mago Mugica
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Karina Mago is a Venezuelan artist currently interested in making ceramic and paper installations that activate spaces through their shadows. Raised in Caracas, then promptly transplanted to South Florida, she was forced to trade rolling mountain ranges and towering steel for sandy beaches and pastel shopping plazas. This shift in surroundings inspired an ongoing fascination with place and memory, the makings of identity. She received her BFA from Florida State University in the Spring of 2017 with concentrations in ceramics, printmaking, and painting and since has completed an Artist Residency for Goggleworks Center for the Arts in Reading, Pa. Currently, Mago is crossing the United States by car, gearing up to begin her term in the Fall of 2018 as the Fine Art Resident for the Mendocino Art Center, in Mendocino, Calif.
Karina Mago es una artista Venezolana, interesada en hacer instalaciones de cerámica y papel que activen los espacios a través de sus sombras. Criada en Caracas pero trasplantada al sur de la Florida, Mago se vio obligada a intercambiar las cordilleras montañosas de su niñez por playas y centros comerciales de colores pasteles. Este cambio en su entorno inspira una fascinación por los lugares y los recuerdos, los ingredientes de la identidad. Ella recibió su BFA de Florida State University en la primavera de 2017 con concentraciones en cerámica, grabado y pintura, y desde entonces ha completado una Residencia de Artista para el Goggleworks Center for the Arts en Reading, Pa.
Actualmente, Mago va a cruzar los Estados Unidos en automóvil, preparándose para comenzar su mandato en el otoño de 2018 como Residente de Bellas Artes para el Mendocino Art Center, en Mendocino, Calif.
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KARINA RAQUEL MAGO MUGICA: Literally just got my citizenship.
HALEY LAUW: Really? Congratulations. I wish I had little airhorns for you. You have dual citizenship now?
MAGO: I do! I now have an American and Venezuelan passport.
Which is good because in Venezuela, things have devolved to such a degree that you can’t go in or out of Venezuela if you don’t have a Venezuelan passport. So, if you’re a Venezuelan citizen but you have dual citizenship, but one of them is expired, then you can enter Venezuela, but you can’t leave.
LAUW: So, you’re just stuck?
MAGO: Right. It used to be that you could enter Venezuela with any passport, but they started asking Americans to get a Venezuelan visa and now it’s just straight up—if you are Venezuelan by birth, you have to have the passport.
LAUW: What is the process like in Venezuela for acquiring a passport?
MAGO: You find someone to bribe. You bribe them. And then you hopefully wait until they grant you a date to go to get your passport. Once you get that date, you go at 4 a.m., you stand in line for 3 hours, only to be told that they don’t have enough materials to make passports and you’re going to have to wait 6 more months.
LAUW: It sounds like you’ve had an experience.
MAGO: Every single time we’ve had an experience. My mom is currently in that gap between accepting the paperwork and giving us a date.
LAUW: How often do you have to renew it?
MAGO: I think ours—well I got mine when I applied to get my BFA at Florida State University. That’s the reason I had to apply early, because I had to leave that weekend to go to Washington to go to the Venezuelan Embassy to get a passport. No big deal. Oh, because the one in Miami was closed and the closest one where we knew someone was D.C. and then they expire in 2020. So, like six years. It’s a huge pain in the butt.
LAUW: Do you feel any more American?
MAGO: Well, considering that people already question whether or not I’m actually Latina … I’m gonna say no. I just feel very disappointed that the person I got to see in that really big video that greets you into the US was Trump and not Obama.
LAUW: What was that like for you, as someone who had already lived in Florida for a long time?
MAGO: Going on 12 years.
LAUW: Did you pay much attention to who the president was when you were a little lass?
MAGO: Well, it was George Bush. What’s funny about it is that my entire life I’ve paid close to politics coming from a place where politics played such a large role in all of our lives and is the reason our lives are shaped the way they are today. So even before coming to the US or since I got here, I kind of knew who he was. I think I was 9—fifth grade. That was the year I got in. And that was the year I learned English, which was wild.
LAUW: Were your parents learning English alongside you?
MAGO: My mom tried. I came to the US a full year before my mom did. My mom and my grandma came with me to take care of me and we lived with my aunt and uncle. My uncle, at the time, was an undocumented worker and my aunt, at the time, was trying to regain her residency in order to regain citizenship in order to marry my uncle. It was kind of like, I think my mom as trying to learn English, but she was in Venezuela still and I was here. It very quickly became for me a huge priority to learn English but also learn English so well that I couldn’t be mistaken for being not American. Because you know, kids are cruel. I was called, I’ll never forget—I knew this girl when I first came here, right? And I thought we were really good friends, and 2 years later when I actually knew English and I also understand all of a sudden that no, she sucks. She’s a bitch. She told me. She was like “hahaha, don’t you remember when we made fun of you for not speaking English?” “We used to call you a lesbian!”
LAUW: You were nine.
MAGO: Right, and I was already from a country where kids are cruel. Kids are cruel everywhere, but when you grow up in such violence and objectification of women there’s this big whirlpool of machismo and sexism and classism. You can see a shift in America from 10 years ago when words and thoughts used to be OK are no longer okay—but when you have a country where you’re so focused on survival, I was already made fun of for being chubby and being the first and last on the bus because I lived the farthest away from the school I went to. But, when I came to the states, because I didn’t understand anything, I only really considered the people who were nice to me. I was like everyone is so nice. That’s amazing. The US is amazing! The kids are so much nicer! But, no, they’re not. It’s a bummer, but it’s alright now.
LAUW: In elementary school, at least they knew my name correctly, but they would say “Haley Lauw is a cow.”
MAGO: It’s always fascinating to look back at those moments and wonder why children can be psychopaths. They’re just so small and there can be so much anger. I guess it’s because you haven’t grown up and understood that your words have meaning, and they affect people. At some point you look up and realize, “Oh! Other people can hear me!”
LAUW: What did you work on at your Goggleworks Residency?
MAGO: I made a new body of work—inspired by Reading, Pa., that are sort of monuments. What I found out before even getting there is that the population is predominantly Hispanic, and it used to be a haven city and publicized in Puerto Rica as like a “little” Puerto Rico. There were so many factories that people flocked to the city because they didn’t need papers to work. When the recession hit, it hit the factories. There are so many buildings.
LAUW: How many languages do you speak? Didn’t you learn French in undergrad?
MAGO: In high school, Thanks Ms. Brujaja. Well, her name was Ms. Brewer and she looked like a witch. I don’t think anyone understood the joke. Bruja is a witch and it was so fitting. She walked around like an ostrich. She got me kicked out of the honor society, which is such a big deal in high school. I want to get accepted to schools! Anything that wasn’t Parisian French to her was trash. So, thanks, Ms. Brujaja for teaching me that Canadians can’t speak French. I guess this is all slander.
LAUW: That does seem like a classist thing to teach kids, though?
MAGO: There was some level of discrimination, for sure.
So, Reading was one of the most dangerous cities. If you walk away from Reading, it’s surrounded by this donut of wealthy property areas. Some of the areas that the factory tycoons owned. Giant mansions with Ivy. Straight out of X-men.
LAUW: It sounds like the work you were making is a response to the contrast of domiciles, for sure.
MAGO: I’ll give you the statement for that show!
LAUW: Can you give it to me in Spanish, too?
MAGO: Inspired by the array of structures scattered throughout Reading, Pa., and the dynamic community that makes this city their own, The Monument Series showcases unsuspecting beauty born from hardship across time. From crumbling factories to colorful bodegas, my ceramic renditions combine the competing facets of this city’s personality in order to share an inclusive narrative.
Inspirada por las estructuras diseminadas por todo Reading, Pa., y por la comunidad que hace suya esta ciudad, The Monument Series (Monumentos) exhibe la belleza desprevenida que nace de la dificultad. Desde fábricas derruidas hasta bodegas coloridas, mis representaciones en cerámica combinan las facetas de la personalidad de esta ciudad para compartir una narrativa más inclusiva.
I’ve been trying to have information for my work in both English and Spanish. There’s such a large number of people who speak Spanish.
LAUW: Do you know how many Spanish speaking individuals live in the US? Should we check out the census?
MAGO: 40 million. 59.0% of Spanish speaking individuals also speak English “very well.”
(In the background, Karina’s mom is speaking to Karina’s grandmother in Spanish.)
LAUW: Hi Mom! What did she say to your grandma?
MAGO: Well, I think she’s talking about Venezuela. There’s always a crisis. Currently the government decided to do a slashing of the currency. You get 1000 bolivars and now everything that is below that digit is gone, so it’s like, that’s not great. With that, the government increased all minimum wage. Something along the lines of 13 to 1800 bolivars just out of the blue. Where is the industry? Where are the workers going to get that money? There’s such a scarcity. The reason why we couldn’t talk yesterday is because my mom ships food and things every month or every other month. I spent like $150 on shipping alone on these square boxes full of oil and tuna cans and tomato cans. Nonperishable items.
LAUW: What’s your hometown?
MAGO: Caracas. I’m from the capital. That’s where my grandmother is from. She was born there. I was born in a beach town nearby, but I’m from Caracas, really. And thank god they’re there in Caracas in the capital because most things and services are still available like water and electricity there, not so much farther away.
LAUW: It’s a bittersweet beautiful thing, but your work has become more precarious and controlled, too.
MAGO: I think as a maker and as I get older, I’m finding my place. While I was working on my BFA thesis and right after graduating, I had this crisis of thought in which I was like, why am I making work about Venezuela when I’m not there? I don’t experience these things now. I’m privileged. I’m living in the United States. The US isn’t so hot right now, but there’s no comparison. So, that lead me through a series of revelations. You know? After a long time of trying to figure out whether to make work about me or my experience, and wondering if it was okay for me to make work about this thing that I’m clearly not participating in directly?
LAUW: It sounds like an identity crisis.
MAGO: Mixed in with survivors’ guilt. A whole lot of both.
(Karina introduces me to her mother via Facetime. She’s wearing scrubs with owls on them. She had just gotten home from work where she cares for a 15-month old baby. She tells me that she has been taking care of her since she was 2 months old. Karina and her mother laugh about the pressure being off of Karina to have kids.)
MAGO: She loves taking care of children. She loves this job.
LAUW: She did a great job with you!
MAGO: Well, funny enough, I was mostly raised by my grandmother. Not that my mother wasn’t there, but my grandmother was the main breadwinner. My dad wasn’t there at all, since I was basically 2, so my mom was always the one that had to go work. She’d leave at 6 a.m. and come home late in the evening. I feel like she’s finally having that experience of having a less stressful environment.
LAUW: Did your mom and grandmother move at the same time from Venezuela to Florida?
MAGO: No, my grandmother moved with me to Florida first. A year later, my mom joined us.
LAUW: What an incredible human. Did your mom get citizenship before you?
MAGO: No. She was like, “You have to get yours first.”
LAUW: Mommmmmm.
MAGO: Yeah, tomorrow, were sitting down to look at paperwork for her. She’s eligible, but because all of the things Trump has said about citizenship, she’s terrified that she won’t get her citizenship.
LAUW: Ugh. Mom, he’s just a big dumb baby.
MAGO: Yeah! I’m excited to vote against him.
LAUW: It seems like it all goes back to how you’re handling the new ceramic works.
MAGO: Right. When I was in Reading with all of those factories I wanted to bring these elements that I was seeing every day and spending ten weeks there and bringing it up in a gallery. Like, hey! It’s okay to have these buildings that are still beautiful in their different aging ways. And also, to say, Hey! These buildings are decrepit in this city. What’s happening? No one is taking care of them.
LAUW: We’ve talked before about moving away from the wall—like literally wall relief sculptures to stand alone pieces that have autonomy and you just got citizenship. In all ways it feels like you’re using the position you have to communicate ideas of growth to others.
MAGO: Through college, which was a very empowering time, it’s that time in which everyone goes off and does their own thing. For me, it was specifically empowering because I came from a Hispanic household—the tradition is not to move away from home. I had to fight to be able to go to FSU.
LAUW: Are you the baby of the family?
MAGO: I am the only. I am the baby.
LAUW: Your mom is so brave.
MAGO: Definitely. After I finished college, I went on a weird series of adventures that built my confidence not only as an immigrant but as a woman and human and adult that can go and do things and when they say things people listen.
LAUW: What’s next for you? You’re moving to California?
MAGO: October 1, I start as a resident at the Mendocino Art Center. I get a studio, and I honestly just want time to be able to sit and for an extended period of time just make work. I want to spend my time working to make a living to eat, pesky human things, but I also want to use that time to do a lot of research. I’ve found that my knowledge is lacking in the academic sense. That’s something I feel like it was just me, maybe I dodged all the bullets. You know, people leave college with theory and books that they read, and I can count them on one hand. I’ve been busy learning how to paint and how to ceramic.
LAUW: Is there anything that you have been reading or looking at that has been inspiring your work?
MAGO: Actually, I have this beautiful sheet of paper from Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. One of the classes a friend was taking was this jewelry class—I’ve made jewelry, but I want to learn how to work with metal.
LAUW: Oh man! I taught myself how to silversmith last summer in Pennsylvania because I met a geologist and was depressed.
MAGO: I really need to learn. But, anyway, the instructor of that class had an amazing artist talk and I fell in love with her work. I immediately, before the talks were finished, went back to her classroom and I noticed that she had a bunch of books on the table. She had these little pieces of paper, these print outs of this book that she clearly printed out for her class. I may have taken one. I really liked everything she was talking about! I wanted to read what she’s read! I wish I could remember her name.
This book is “Losing Site: Architecture, Memory, and Place” by Shelley Hornstein. If that doesn’t sound like the darn neatest thing you’ve ever seen I don’t know what is. “Sight is always present but always also lost in a physical sense, perhaps in recuperated an imagined sphere yet the triggers much exist in the physical world for the recall to carry on into future generations.”
It kind of talks about how a site will always exist as long as an image of that still exists. Which is so close to the work I’m trying to do, because I’ve realized the more work I make I have this frenzied need to recreate these feelings and spaces that I found myself surrounded by in my youth but to adapt them to the spaces I’m in now—combining them.