Читать книгу Zapantera Negra - Группа авторов - Страница 9

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.