The Zapatista Wi-Fi Rebellion

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Sep 20, 22-23

Organized by gloria galvez

The military and commercial roots of the web stretch back to the 1980s, when the U.S. Department of Defense implemented the first workable prototype of the Internet to connect regional military networks. The resistance and revolutionary roots of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) stretch back to the early 1990s and have included a dazzling array of workable strategies for subverting corporate and military control of Mexico, returning power to her indigenous people.

Inspired by the digital presence of Zapatistas on the internet as a phenomenon with massive possibilities for broad-based resistance beyond Mexico, The Zapatista Wi-Fi Rebellion is a program that aims to educate and activate audiences around rebellious internet usage in corporate imperial cyberspace. Consisting of an exhibition titled Glitching the System, a screening of The Sixth Sun: Mayan Uprising in Chiapas followed by a skype with artist Skawennati, lectures by Fran Ilich and Daniela Lieja Quintanar, a workshop and zine by Color Coded, The Zapatista Wi-Fi Rebellion is the third installment in NAVEL’s ongoing series The New Internet Commons.

Featuring

Glitching the System Exhibition with work by

  • Fran Ilich
  • Taniel Morales
  • Anxious to Make
  • Taeyoon Choi
  • Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace

Screening of The Sixth Sun: Mayan Uprising in Chiapas by

  • Saul Landau

Presentations by

  • Fran Ilich
  • Daniela Lieja Quintanar
  • Skawennati

Workshop and zine by

Vendors

  • revolutionary autonomous communities (r.a.c) (only on Sep 20)
  • mutual aid action los angeles (m.a.a.l.a) (only on Sep 20)
    Vegetarian food, snacks, diy soap and goods will be sold. Make sure to bring cash to buy and support their fundraising efforts and movement for justice. NAVEL will also have Zapatista coffee beans for sale.

Support for Fran Ilich’s lecture is provided by The Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)

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gloria galvez is Los Angeles based and maintains a life practice that disrupts, subverts, and dismantles bland and oppressive status-quo norms. She is committed to creating access to physical and abstract spaces of possibility, imagination and self-determination for communities and individuals for whom it’s constantly denied. https://gloria-galvez.com/

Fran Ilich is an artist and writer based in New York City who works in the theory and practice of narrative media, experimental economies and finance, and hacktivism. He is the author of several award-winning novels, a monograph on narrative and ideology, and numerous works of narrative media that range from interactive web telenovelas, experimental theater, alternate reality games, and utopian experiments in social organization that link agriculture and art. In his recent project, Aridoamérica Winter Plan, he turned a storefront space in Williamsburg into a neighborhood coffee co-op with its own micro-economy, for a solo exhibition funded by ISCP at El Museo de Los Sures. He was a fellow at Eyebeam and A Blade of Grass. he has produced work for exhibitions or projects of the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, No Longer Empty and others. He was Visiting Lecturer at the Literature Department of the University of California San Diego and director of the Literature Department at Centro Cultural Tijuana. He participated in Berlinale Talent Campus, Transmediale, ARCO, Documenta, EZLN’s Festival Mundial de la Digna Rabia, Other Futures (Amsterdam), Antidoto (Sao Paulo), The Economist Summit Mexico. Has shown work at the Walker Art Center, Creative Time Living as Form, IAGO (Oaxaca), and others.

Daniela Lieja Quintanar (Mexico City, 1984) is a curator at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) where she has curated several exhibitions such as Unraveling Collective Forms and Emory Douglas: Bold Visual Language. She is part of the curatorial team of MexiCali Biennial 2018-19, and was recently awarded the Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship. She served as Project Coordinator and Contributing Curatorial Advisor for Below the Underground: Renegade Art and Action in the 1990s Mexico at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Getty PST:LA/LA initiative.

Taeyoon Choi is an artist, writer and computer programmer. He makes paintings, performances and installations that intersect his research and practice. He collaborates with various local communities, collectives and small institutions. Recently, he’s thinking about the relationships between personhood, technology, environment, gender, race, and disability. He’s a co-founder of the School for Poetic Computation, where he continues to teach and organize research projects. He was a fellow at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, Data and Society Research Institute. His projects were presented at the LACMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, Mediacity Seoul Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, Istanbul Design Biennale and more. Taeyoon is an immigrant from South Korea, based in Lenapehoking, otherwise known as New York City. http://taeyoonchoi.com/

Taniel Morales is an artist and social hacker who ran a pirate radio collaboratively with Zapatistas and now runs a soundcloud inspired by the pirate radio project.

Color Coded is an activist coding collective that amplifies groups and individuals who are uplifting and sustaining communities of color—in Los Angeles and beyond. https://colorcoded.la/

Anxious to Make is the collaborative practice of Liat Berdugo and Emily Martinez, two commissioning bodies. Their focus is on economic concepts, such as cryptocurrencies and the so-called “sharing economy,” and the accelerationist, neoliberal landscapes associated with them. Their work examines how these economic concepts intersect with colonialism, technology, wealth culture, race, altruism, utopianism, and exploitation. http://anxioustomake.ga/

Liat Berdugo is an artist, writer, and curator based in Oakland, CA. Her work strives to create an expanded, thoughtful consideration for digital culture. Berdugo has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally, and collaborates widely with individuals and archives. She is an Assistant Professor of Art and Architecture at the University of San Francisco. More at http://liatberdugo.com.

Emily Martinez is an artist working with digital and networked media. Her recent practice and research interests examine the relationship between media, memory, and catastrophe; post-representational forms of subjectivity, emancipatory practices, and the digital archive. Currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. More at http://somethingnothing.me.

Saul Landau (1936-2013) was an Emmy-winning, internationally-known scholar, author, commentator, and filmmaker on foreign and domestic policy issues. Landau’s most widely praised achievements are the over forty films he has produced on social, political and historical issues, and worldwide human rights, for which he won the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, the George Polk Award for Investigative Reporting, and the First Amendment Award, as well as an Emmy for Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang.

Skawennati makes art that addresses history, the future, and change. Born in Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, Skawennati holds a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, where she is based. She is Co-Director, with Jason E. Lewis, of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research network of artists, academics and technologists investigating, creating and critiquing Indigenous virtual environments. She also co-directs their workshops in Aboriginal Storytelling and Digital Media. Skins, This year, AbTeC launched IIF, the Initiative for Indigenous Futures; Skawennati is its Partnership Coordinator.

Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace is an Aboriginally determined research-creation network whose goal is to ensure Indigenous presence in the web pages, online environments, video games, and virtual worlds that comprise cyberspace. Co-founded and co-directed by Jason Edward Lewis and Skawennati, our multi-faceted effort includes artwork, writing, lectures, workshops, residencies, and exhibitions. AbTeC’s roots lie with a project called CyberPowWow, a pioneering on-line gallery and chat space for contemporary Indigenous art.

Visual designed by Jay Are
Image by Zapatista Block

The New Internet Commons

Series

An ongoing series of events which aims to understand the state of the world wide web today in contrast with the early unravelings of its utopian vision.