Introduction

Maria Inarita Uthe is based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Maria is involved with/in Kunci Copy Station, Yogyakarta Art Book Fair, and KUNCI Study Forum and Collective. She works at the intersection of art and cultural praxis. Trained in Visual Communication Design, she approaches publishing and design as tools for circulating and questioning knowledge, which extends her inquiry into publishing as both artistic and reproductive practices.

In 2021, she participated in a publishing residency with Cooperativa Cráter Invertido in Mexico, which deepened her interest in translocalities, self-publishing networks, and alternative forms of editorial distribution. In the same year, she exhibited a work grounded in acts of note-taking at Festival Kebudayaan Yogyakarta 2021, through repurposing vernacular/bootlegging language on government-subsidised goods across various commodities to problematise its political power. The work offers a satirical criticism on unequal access to food, healthcare, employment, identity, education, and infrastructure as well as pointing to broader forms of structural neglect.

Recently, she shared her reflections on graphic design as positionalities and method through workshops and presentations that she co-facilitated with Sejawat Merawat for the Indonesian Pavilion at the 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024) in South Korea, exploring questions on care works and labour within personal and collective practice.