The World Making of EDELO

En Donde Era La ONU/ Where the United Nations Used to Be
Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte

Introduction

The first-ever survey exhibition of Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte’s collective practice, EDELO is not a traditional art survey of existing artworks, as the artists do not typically make objects or installations for institutional gallery spaces. Instead, composed primarily of newly edited videos, site specific installations, and performances, the exhibition brings together distinct images, modes of making, and materials that have defined the artists’ unconventional 15-year collaboration.

EDELO takes its name from a collective undertaking by Mia Eve Rollow, Caleb Duarte, and collaborators between 2009- 2014 in a repurposed United Nations (UN) building in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the colonial capital of Chiapas, Mexico. In 2009, the building was occupied by over 100 displaced indigenous community members as a means to attract international attention to the ongoing forced evictions and removals of peasant farmers (‘campesinos’) from their lands and the resulting humanitarian crisis in the region. In response to this protest, the UN abandoned the building, revealing the bureaucratic and intergovernmental limits of its professed aim of maintaining international peace, protecting human rights, and delivering humanitarian aid.

In the aftermath of this abandonment, Rollow and Duarte invited artists, activists, cultural workers, and community members to the building to explore how art could answer the unfulfilled promises of the UN. The collective undertaking was inspired by the Zapatistas, the indigenous peasant rights movement from Chiapas. On January 1, 1994, the day Mexico signed on to the North American Free Trade agreement (NAFTA), the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) declared war on the Mexican government. In opposition to neoliberalism, economic globalization, and the continued dispossession of indigenous communities, they demanded “work, land, housing, food, health care, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace” for all.^[1] Zapatistas established autonomous rural territories (Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities, also called ‘Caracoles’ or ‘Snails’) throughout Chiapas, which continue, 30 years later, to operate with self-management outside of Mexican state power.

Rollow, Duarte, and their collaborators find inspiration in the roles that art and culture play within the establishment of Zapatista autonomy and their continued re-conceptualization of political institutions and world systems. From the production of a Zapatista collective identity through the use of face coverings to the extensive muralism in community spaces, the movement utilizes a highly developed, revolutionary aesthetic to imagine and put into practice new concepts of living drawn from indigenous worldviews. The transformation of the former UN facility into EDELO aimed to follow that model by providing an experimental space where artists and activists from around the globe could collaborate and learn from the local communities of rural Chiapas about how, outside of globalized systems of economics, art can be– and is– action and a form of collective resistance.

EDELO, the exhibition, puts into context the four years the artists spent in San Cristóbal de las Casas and rural Chiapas with the “nomadic” version of EDELO that they’ve undertaken since with dispossessed communities throughout Mexico; Southern Chile; West Bank, Palestine; and elsewhere. Continuing to learn from Zapatista practices, the artists work with asylum seekers, land-back communities, laborers, people with physical disabilities (often the result of state violence), and other collaborators across the globe to develop an aesthetic language of liberation that can transgress state, ideological, and physical borders. In the survey, relationships are made–both constructed and revealed– between struggles across seemingly disparate regions and geopolitical circumstances. Newly edited, nonsequential, non-geographically delineated videos, largely taken on phones, offer poetic documentation of some of these past performances and actions undertaken by the artists and their collaborators. Site specific sculptures, including a 20-foot x 15-foot wall and an unwieldy pile of benches, are made from materials and images of past art projects. Embroideries from a women’s embroidery collective in rural Chiapas and a new 41-foot earthen sculpture, constructed in collaboration with people who are formerly incarcerated and/ or undocumented in Northern Central California (including Fresno and Santa Cruz), broaden these relations into the regional context of the exhibition.

Rollow says, “Because when we try to manifest a liberated society that doesn’t yet exist, who else has the imagination to dream it more than the ones who are made to fight for their every breath?”^[2] New worlds seem imminently possible, if still buried deep underground, in the relationships and shared world-making of EDELO.

Artworks

Zapantera Negra in Transit I, 2011/ 2025
Zapantera Negra in Transit II, 2011/ 2025

Zapantera Negra In Transit is named for an EDELO project with Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party. During his residency at EDELO, Douglas worked with people and spent time in Zapatista territory, researching and making work about the aesthetics, revolutionary dreams, and organizing of the Zapatista and Blank Panther movements. Putting into relation these struggles against racial capitalism and colonialism, state repression and international war and plunder, he worked with collaborators, including women embroidery collectives, other artists, and organizers to record interviews, make militant artwork, and archive original documents from these movements’ struggle for liberation.

For Zapantera Negra in Transit I and II, towering, 2-sided walls are made out of lumber repurposed from Rollow and Duarte’s past murals and projects; embroidery and images created in collaboration with Douglas; and images from other community-based projects (including, in the most prominent image of an orange figure, with asylum seekers from Guatemala). The results are reminiscent of quilting; different projects are the fabric which become one tapestry of resistance. Continuing the history of institutional critique that EDELO emerges from, the walls far exceed the white walls of gallery space, looming into shadows over the lighting grid that is designed to light the white walls, expanding into the 2nd floor offices of the building housing the gallery and into the ceiling.

Assembly, 2011/ 2025
Wood benches, fence boards, lumber, mural fragments

Multiple benches are heaped in an unwieldy pile for Assembly, unsuitable for passive seating. Similar to Zapantera Negra In Transit I and II, the benches are made out of lumber and images repurposed from Rollow and Duarte’s past murals and projects, as well as new wood 2x4s. With benches that cannot be sat on made out of remnants of community-based art projects, art is delinked from being produced in response to a gaze, or understood within only a history of observation. Instead, Assembly evokes art within the making of democracy and histories of anarchic civic engagement; the structure is designed to be activated by groups of people working in consensus (the benches are too heavy and long to be moved alone) who must work together to rearrange the benches to make space for gatherings.

Universidad de la Tierra, 2025 (inspired by CIDECI Unitierra, Chiapas)
Wood, chicken wire, pool noodles, stucco, soil, cement
41 x 5 feet

This massive, 41-foot site specific earthen artwork, named in homage to a community-established communal learning space in San Cristóbal de las Casas, was constructed between Fresno and Santa Cruz over a 3-month period and hundreds of hours with the assistance of multiple communities, including students, artists, and laborers, including people undocumented and formerly incarcerated. Made out of dirt, cement, and other easily accessible materials from Home Depot, Universidad de la Tierra is both a sculpture and a site for performance. Ittakes the form of a root, or a tunnel, and begins on one end with a hole dug through a concrete slab. The concrete erupts into earth before taking a rootlike form to spread across the gallery, ending at the far wall with another hole. The sculpture is activated during the exhibition periodically by the people who helped construct it, who perform a different labor by standing for durations stretching from 15 minutes to an hour, one person in the cement slab that severs the body from the land, and another in the hole burrowing through the root, so that the body is part of the earth.

The Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, from whom Zapatistas took their name, said: “The land belongs to those who work it.” With the concrete slab a reminder of the walls and borders that attempt to place people within racial capitalism, Universidad de la Tierra is a mnemonic device for the memories and knowledges carried within the land, and rooted in relationships of human and other-than-human care and reciprocity. Spanning between the videos and other works in EDELO, it enacts the movement and coalition building that, if sometimes pushed underground, continues to grow.

Videos

Chasing the Beast: Tijuana, Mexico, 2021/ 2025
Community art laboratory and performances 
In collaboration with Chaparral Refugee Camp & Embajada Migrante
3-channel video, 31 min.
Supported by Creative Capital

Chasing the Beast: Tijuana, Mexico is composed of documentation of the performances and collective practices between a team of artists and asylum seekers gathered in El Chaparral refugee sanctuary and the Embassy of the Migrante, in Tijuana, Mexico. From 2019- 2021, collaborators worked to create objects and perform invisible theater at the Mexico/ US Border. Evoking the Zapatista’s use of the snail, which carries its home on its back, as a symbol of the patience and pace of revolution, the collaborators designed homes to carry about their heads and to set on fire in front of the border wall.

Chasing the Beast: Chiapas, Mexico, 2014
With the collaboration of Saúl Kak, La 72, and Buen Pastor Refugee Safe Houses, Suchiate River Border

The train Central American refugees take across Mexico in hopes of making it to the United States is known as “The Beast,” based on the frequency of kidnapping, extortion, human trafficking, rape, and homicide which the asylum seekers endure along the train route. For Chasing the Beast: Chiapas, Mexico, beginning at the Suchiate River, at the border between Guatemala and Mexico, the artists and collaborators from Honduras and elsewhere traveled the migrant route to three safe houses, creating collaborative performances and a multimedia and documentary project with the refugees traveling the migrant routes through Mexico.

Burial: Chiapas, Mexico, 2011
With the collaboration of the community in Elambo Bajo, Autonomous Territory.

The day-long community action of digging was done as a performance of the history of genocide against the Maya population in Guatemala and Mexico. The digging was formulated as a game designed around the metaphor of planting a seed that would burst from the earth and emerge as a fruit-bearing tree, while also burying the violent histories carried by our bodies. Burial was one of many actions, workshops, events and performances created with the community of Elambo Bajo from 2010 to 2016 as part of larger collaborative works with EDELO and its artist residency.

Padre No Me Pegues / Father Don’t Hit Me: Chiapas, Mexico, 2013
With the collaboration of Dalia Perez, Adriana Tomy Santiz

This performance was against the violence of patriarchy. While women performed different incarnations of gender and sisterhood, a truck drove past blaring words from its loudspeaker: “Old beds, broken refrigerators, rusted metal. Trade in your used goods, and we will pay you a very good price.” Echoing through the performance, the words became an eerie reminder of women as objects, often tossed away or sold.

Ayotzinapa: Guerrero, Mexico, 2014
With the collaboration of Saúl Kak and the community from Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College

The Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, founded in 1926, is an all-male school that has historically been associated with student activism. On September 26, 2014, forty-three students were forcibly abducted and then disappeared. In protest, other students from the school seized official vehicles belonging to several transnational companies and used them in protest, demanding the return of their companions. In December 2014, we designed an intervention project with Ayotzinapa students, parents of missing teachers, activists, human-rights defenders, and the larger community.  For ten days, the collaborators worked day and night to put images of resistance on the vehicles.

Bartolomay: Oaxaca, Mexico, 2012
With the collaboration of community at Pina Palmera Rehabilitation Center

An important aspect of creating “other worlds” is the belief that each culture, each language, and each individual creates a unique understanding of beauty, normality, happiness and autonomy. The cultures of capitalism and consumerism persuade large populations that there is only one way toward progress and prosperity.  Here Bartolomay Martinez creates an understanding of beauty outside of the commercialization of the body and mind.  He narrates his story as he creates, stands on, and destroys his legs while next to a large heart.  Then he crawls into a hole in the ground.

Santos/ Saint: Chiapas, Mexico, 2018
With the collaboration of community in Elambo Bajo, Autonomous Zapatista Territory, Santos Hernandez, Baha Al-Zain, and EZLN Elambo Community

In collaboration with Santos from Chamula – the protagonist, Baha from Jordan/Palestine, the EZLN Elambo community and EDELO, the artists created a mythical public spectacle that reflected the need to create myths to understand the complexities and layers of disability, autonomy, violence, cultural appropriation, and colonialism.

We Are Worthy of Life: Anonymous Refugee Camp, West Bank, Palestine, 2019
Undertaken over 3 months in a refugee camp in West Bank, Palestine, the film and performance project was directed by people with disabilities due to the Israeli occupation. In this segment, X recounts the visions he had while in a coma after having been shot in the head by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). He had two visions: one of himself as a martyr, and the other of him rising from the dead and throwing stones to defend Palestine. In this performance, he reenacts his rising, steadfastly protecting the land.

Chi Kawell Pieb: Chile, 2024
With the collaboration of community in Mapuche Territory

In Chile, National Police Day is commemorated on April 28th. On National Police Day in 2024, the police commander was under active investigation for corruption. However, when three police were murdered in and burned in a truck staged beside a mural of a ceremonial Mapuche horse in the BioBio region, where the indigenous resistance is high, the charges of corruption were overturned. The Mapuche community was portrayed as terrorists, and the police commander portrayed as the hero. Video documentation shows the increased militarization of the region after the murders while the police chief and his men theatrically look for the assassins. “Chi Kawello Peib”, “The Horse is Witness: is graffitied on the mural under their nose by the community, signaling that the Mapuche horse is the only one to know the true authors of the immolation.

Zapantera Negra: Chiapas, Mexico, 2013
Featuring footage from the Black Panther Party archive and Carla Astorga’s Marcha de Silencio, 2013

Zapantera Negra: Chiapas, Mexico puts into the revolutionary organizing and world-making of Black Panther Party into relation with the liberatory work by autonomous Indigenous and Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. The videocompiles footage from interviews, militant artwork, and original documents compiled from these two movements’ struggle for liberation.

Embajada de Inútil: Chiapas, Mexico, 2014
With the collaboration of community in Elambo Bajo, Autonomous Zapatista Territory
Performance by Aureliano Martinez

EDI is a social practice project that examines how ableism, colonialism, patriarchy and white supremacy have traumatized disabled bodies generationally.  EDI (Embassy of the Useless) is the absurd that mimics formal diplomacy, creating a parallel world to that of ableism promoted by monolithic capitalism. The title comes from a derogatory Spanish term for the disabled, “inútil”, translated back into English as “useless”.  Here Aureliano shows himself as the opposite of useless.

Pink Ladder, Embassy of the Refugee Project. 2019.
Sculptural performance for Suzan Lacy retrospective, “We Are Here”, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and SFMOMA, San Francisco Ca. Micaela Pablo Martin, Cecilia Pablo Martin, Gabriela Ramos Mendoza, Heydi Jeronimo Pablo

Embassy of the Refugee is a series of works created by students from Fremont High School’s Newcomer Educational Support and Transition (NEST) program. Students arrived to the United States as unaccompanied youth from Guatemala in 2014 as they sought to seek asylum. Performances were created during a two year nomadic art studio program initiated by artist Caleb Duarte with the support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and La Peña Cultural center in Berkeley. Sculptural performances took form at the Oakland Bart station, the Malcolm X Jazz Festival, Bay Area Now 8,  at Bay Area Mural Festival and throughout public spaces around the Bay Area. In Pink Ladder, portable objects set up stages to become mobile community actions drawing attention to issues of global migration, social mobility, human endurance, indigenous resistance, and our capacity to transform moments of tragedy into opportunities for healing.

^[1] EZLN (General Command). “First Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle.” https://schoolsforchiapas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/1st-Declaration-of-the-Lacandona-Jungle.pdf

^[2] https://www.visartscenter.org/mia-eve-rollow-interview/