Zilah Garcia’s artistic voice is woven from a rare crossing
of worlds. Her first encounter with materials happened in
her mother’s porcelain studio, and later she built a solid
career in the textile world, where the precision of stitching
and the language of textures became like a second skin.
But the call of art pulled her elsewhere: she studied fresco
in Florence, explored watercolor in depth, and found at
Rio’s Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage — a hub of
contemporary Brazilian art — the ground where her
conceptual research matured. It is in this intersection,
between inherited gestures and intellectual inquiry, that
her work finds its unique strength.
Zilah’s art doesn’t depict a landscape; it reveals its traces.
In her studio, earth is not just pigment but a body, and
plastic isn’t just a material — it’s a witness. Her practice is
a kind of archaeology of our times: a patient excavation of
what society discards — both the physical waste that
chokes the planet and the psychological anxiety that
comes with living among it.
In her hands, plastic transcends its status as trash and
becomes a language. Zilah flips the logic of consumption,
turning the disposable into something enduring: a
shopping bag, made for an instant of use yet destined to
linger for centuries, is pulled back into time through art.
Every fragment holds a story. When she reflects on the
worn flip-flops she finds, still bearing the imprint of
someone’s steps, she doesn’t see garbage — she sees
“questions made tangible.” Who wore these? How did they
get home? Did they ever think about the impact of that
gesture? Her art, in this way, becomes an act of listening
to these silent narratives.