Urrutia with California State University Fresno, David and Laurie Duarte and Pinta. A special thanks to our Kickstarter supporters.
PREFACE
Marc James Léger and David Tomas
ZAPANTERA NEGRA IS A PROJECT defined by the social, cultural, and political experiences of several art activists who brought together the ideological and aesthetic frameworks of the Zapatistas and Black Panthers. The project coalesced around the alternative architectural site known as EDELO (En Donde Era la ONU [Where the United Nations Used to Be]), a centripetal community and artistic space of collective activities and freewheeling creation founded by Caleb Duarte Piñon and Mia Eve Rollow in 2009 in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.
This book is a medium for those experiences as they reveal the various social spaces that are negotiated through Zapantera Negra, from the Black Arts Movement and the anticolonial, revolutionary politics of the Panthers, to Indigenous cosmology and the communal struggles of the Zapatistas. Voiced and refracted through interviews and personal recollections, and depicted through poetic fantasy and artistic self-determination, the different elements of this book come together to assert an optimistic resistance to social and cultural repression, economic austerity, and police impunity. The origin of this book was the presentation of Zapantera Negra at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, from June 21 to June 28, 2014. This exhibition, with its varied program of artworks, discussions, and workshops, unfolded in the context of Encuentro IX: MANIFEST! Choreographing Social Movements in the Americas, organized by New York University’s Instituto Hemisférico de Performance & Política [Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics].
It was during this exhibition that we recorded a compelling and altogether out of the ordinary presentation by Emory Douglas, Saúl Kak, and Mia Eve Rollow. We consequently interviewed these three participants in EDELO’s Zapantera Negra, and they discussed the basis of their artistic collaboration in resistance and the myriad aspects of social and political engagement through culture. Their presentation is reproduced here in full as are the two interviews that we conducted with them at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery. This material is complemented by the addition of a text by Rigo 23 and an interview with Caleb Duarte Piñon. After the first main section, a second section of documents allows for a comparison of the political platforms of the Zapatistas and Black Panthers with texts that reflect the various ways in which this political material has been translated into ideas concerning cultural production.
The book’s presentation and the interactions between interviews, source texts, and visual documents is designed to provide an experience that exceeds what one might expect from a straightforward documentary history. Its different elements detail a viable sociopolitical practice on the Left that opposes those that currently animate the contemporary neoliberal universe and its hegemonic consumer-based economies. In solidarity with its contributors, whose kind collaboration made this book possible, Zapantera Negra presents a heterogeneous, intergenerational road map for a transcontinental culture of creation, providing insights into the ways in which different traditions of political art and social activism can be fused together in the service of emancipatory social change.
INTRODUCTION
EDELO
IN 1994 THE ZAPATISTA UPRISING, a Mexican Indigenous movement from the southern state of Chiapas, produced and leveraged a new form of revolutionary communication through the Internet. The distribution of information, actions, images, and video spread throughout the world in real time, bringing awareness while building solidarity for what the New York Times called “the first postmodern revolution.” Positioning itself as a struggle against neoliberalism and waged against five hundred years of oppression, Zapatismo has employed new technologies of information distribution in order to articulate its wants and beliefs to a global audience.
In the fall of 2009, over one hundred displaced Indigenous community members occupied the offices of the United Nations, located in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. The offices were taken over in the hope of gaining international attention from humanitarian organizations. After a few months of the occupation, the United Nations simply decided to find another building and moved.
A few months later, Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte Piñon, disillusioned with institutional art and wishing to believe that art can be a radical form of communication, moved into the building and established an experimental art space and international artist residency for diverse practices. We invited artists, activists, cultural workers, inventors, gardeners, PhDs, jugglers, and educators to take part in creating an experiment in art and social change. Disenchanted with the linear path of art history, these artists came to EDELO (En Donde Era la ONU [Where the United Nations Used to Be]) in favor of art as a vehicle for social transformation. Inspired by the Zapatista uprising, where words and poetry are used to inspire a generation to imagine ‘other’ possible worlds, EDELO retained the name of the UN office as part of an investigation into how art, in all its disciplines and contradictions, can take the supposed role of such institutional bodies to create understanding, empathy, and to serve as a tool for imagining alternatives to a harmful and violent system that we do not have to accept.
Zapantera Negra gathered the visual results of four encounters, between 2012 and 2014, between the Black Panthers and Zapatistas and guided by the works and presence of Emory Douglas, the former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party. For this encounter, Emory teamed up with Zapatista women embroidery collectives, Zapatista farmers and painters, and with local artists, activists, and musicians to create new works that reflect and celebrate these two powerful movements. Although each movement presents a distinct position in terms of cultural and political milieus, they both build on a shared understanding of the power of art. After a series of public interventions, installations, video art, performances, mural paintings, lectures, and after living and working with Zapatista families, Zapantera Negra presents a collection of works that were ignited collectively by the public’s desire and need to demonstrate, protest, and create. In times of much revolutionary fever and economic inequality, we feel it is important to share what art can do, and has already done, to create change
Such a radical break is represented by the creation of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966 and the artworks created by Emory Douglas for its newspaper. At its peak in 1970, four hundred thousand copies of The Black Panther newspaper were distributed weekly throughout the United States. Within its pages, Emory published his artworks in an effort to “illustrate conditions that made revolution seem necessary [and to] construct a visual mythology of power for people who felt powerless and victimized.” The newspaper and its accompanying illustrations played a central role in the articulation of the “What We Want, What We Believe” portion of the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program. The Black Panther Party newspaper helped to establish a Black Panther aesthetic of Black Power and Revolution.
Although the Black Panther and the Zapatista movements occurred in distinct cultural, political, and historical milieus, the two share a common appreciation of the power of the image and the written word to translate their respective social movements into personal, collective, transformative, and public experiences. In contrast to the strong self-definition established and disseminated by these two movements via media channels, today’s multimedia, plugged-in landscape seems to promote social indifference. In opposition to this ambient apathy as well as the ‘high art’ practices taught by leading institutions, Zapantera Negra is a project that demonstrates how contemporary art can sidestep conventional political and conceptual performance practices by working in communities of struggle from the ground up. Zapantera Negra is a grassroots effort to bring together two very powerful visual and political social movements.
