ENTIERRO
BURIAL
The projects at EDELO involved issues facing Indigenous groups in Chiapas, related to what M. Bianet Castellanos, Lourdes Gutie´rrez Na´jera, and Arturo J. Aldama describe as the context for Indigenous peoples in Mexico, Central America, and Latin America, which includes fighting for their “autonomy, including the right to self governance and self-determination, independent from their national governments.” One of the groups that Duarte and Rollow worked with was an autonomous Maya community in Elambo Bajo, a village one hour north of San Cristo´bal de las Casas. Elambo Bajo is part of La Otro Campan˜a, which as Duarte noted in an interview was established by the Zapatistas “to build Indigenous solidarity throughout Mexico and develop a system that separates itself from the political process through selfrun collective organizing.” Duarte further explained, “it’s a way of becoming socially and politically independent from the state and to encourage different people in the struggle to organize.”
EDELO’s first engagement with Elambo Bajo was Entierro, a performance during which children from the community buried the artists in the ground. Afterwards, the artists created a game where they buried community members “using the metaphor of planting a seed that would burst from the earth and emerge as a fruit-bearing tree.” This game also narrated the history of genocide against the Maya population in Guatemala, including children, who government forces viewed as “bad seeds” due to their relation to “internal enemies” of the state. As Duarte describes, the game “hinged on the concept of breaking away from a colonial mind-set, shifting to one focused on the earth and a cosmology centered on acknowledgement of the violent histories carried by our bodies.”
-Excerpt from The Work of Arte Urgente - Performative Acts of Political and Artistic Imagination by Rebecca M Schreiber
The personal backstory to the burial piece was in 2009 when I moved from the US to Mexico, two years after becoming paraplegic, I went directly to live with the matriarch healer off the coast of Oaxaca. She had me buried every sunrise for the duration of a month in order to extract the cold air that had entered and was trapped in my body from the western medical system. As the sun rose the heat would enter my body through the sand, a makeshift temascal or sauna along with the plant medicines I was consuming would help endure my body riddled with pain. During this transition time my body was reacting in extreme ways, however this potent form of healing and ridding of colonialism from my body was integral to my physical and spiritual growth. The theme of burial began to emerge in the work I was involved in.
-Mia Eve
Chiapas Mexico 2011
EDELO Collaborative lead by Mia
& Caleb Duarte
Elambo Bajo, Autonomous Zapatista Territory
Ongoing Community Workshops and Performances