As part of The Zapatista Wi-fi Rebellion program, organized by gloria galvez, join us for an evening of presentations by Fran Ilich and Daniela Lieja Quintanar, followed by a reception for the exhibition.

Fran Ilich is a media artist, essayist, novelist, and activist. His work focuses on the theory and practice of narrative media, experimental economies and finance, hacktivism, and utopian experiments in social organizations. Ilich will present about Spacebank, an ongoing art project and virtual community investment bank he founded in 2005. The project uses alternative currencies, barter, a stock exchange, and other financial tools to create a nano-macro economy as a means of supporting an alternative economy with politically aligned creatives in New York and elsewhere, like Zapatista coffee growers. We will be selling Zapatista coffee beans on site.

In her presentation, curator Daniela Lieja Quintanar will discuss the use of Zapatista framework within artistic practices and in her own curatorial work; to produce critical and political discourses. These models consist of strategies against neoliberal logic and propose ways to decolonize thought and practice through autonomous and collective processes. Lieja Quintanar will present Terreno peligroso-Danger Zone (1995), a unique art project between Chicano and Mexican artists, and La Feria del Rebelde (The Rebel’s Fair, 1994), an exhibition in Mexico City reacting to a time of social crisis—as two case studies that connect with contemporary artistic practices in Los Angeles and Mexico.

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

Schedule

4:30PM: Doors
5-6PM: Presentation by Fran Ilich
6-7PM: Presentation by Daniela Lieja Quintanar
7-9PM: Exhibition Reception

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.

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/

Image by Fran Ilich