MIA
Mia is a nomadic artist whose practice seeks to contravene in disabling acts of power. Her site-specific, community-engaged performance, murals, video, and sculptures cultivate terrains of spiritual, social, and cultural resistance.
My work considers how factors such as disability, disenfranchisement, and political borders can restrict mobility. As a whole, my practice emphasizes intersectionality and stems from a commitment to creative collaboration. Employing consultation, ritual, and public performance, I participate in collaborative work that explores how ideas, forms, and gestures can travel when and where certain bodies may not.
I have lived with paraplegia since 2007, and my lived experiences inform my practice. As an artist and organizer, I have collaborated with dispossessed communities across Mexico, Chile, Palestine, Cuba, Senegal and others, collectively creating multifaceted art projects about issues of mobility. I have worked with land-back communities, laborers, femicide victims, asylum seekers, freedom fighters, and people with physical disabilities (often resulting from state violence). We produce public performances, murals, video recordings, and sculptural public interventions, giving form to an aesthetic language of liberation that transcends state, ideological, and physical borders.
My work arises from my body, my grief, and a sense of obligation to those still suffering under violent systems. This work takes on different forms of trauma and restricted mobility. I approach disability not as a deficit, however, but as a portal. My practice works to transform trauma into ritual, isolation into communion, and fear into myth. I don’t simply create for audiences—I create with and through community. As a co-collaborator, I am also an active participant; my body and my history are on the line in each new piece and with each new project. In community work and performances, my body bears witness to the limitations of political, social, and economic power.
This is a pivotal point in human history. We are mired in a crisis, surrounded by irreversible environmental damage and unrelenting greed. Disabilities are multiplying, with governments actively targeting large swathes of people, particularly the disenfranchised. As a disabled artist working with the communities most impacted, I believe that art can serve as a catalyst for consciousness raising and collective action in this critical time, empowering others to come together for meaningful change.
The arts can provide essential resources and forms of self-determination that state authorities are unable, or unwilling, to provide. Influenced by socially-engaged contemporary art and grassroots social movements, I help to create immersive work that offers radical alternatives to current political structures. Much of my thinking has been inspired by the Zapatista movement.
I was immersed in this form of ongoing, creative reconceptualization of political institutions and world systems while collaborating on a five-year project with artist Caleb Duarte in Chiapas, Mexico. We transformed a building formerly occupied by the United Nations into a cultural center and safe house called EDELO, where artists and activists from around the world could collaborate with rural communities to explore ways to use art as a form of collective resistance and direct action. While my approach starts simply—I spend time within a community, conducting research, sharing daily experiences, and working together—each partnership takes its own shape, producing something unique and site-specific.
Once inhabiting the building of the former UN, EDELO Migrante is now nomadic collectives creating works with diverse communities around the world. Performances and public interventions are created with asylum seekers, freedom fighters, and others, using principles of reciprocity and care to build a repertoire of ancestral knowledge and creative expressions rooted in lived experience and collective wisdom.
Rollow’s work has been featured most recently in a survey exhibition at UC Santa Cruz. It's been also shown in The Red Cat Gallery, New York; Casa de Americas, Cuba; Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Canada; Paco das Artes, Brazil; Reina Sofia Museum, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City; Kunsthalle Wien Museum, Vienna; Contemporary Art Space, Uruguay; and Museo de Moneda, Chile. Their practice has featured in books, including The Art of Accompaniment: Visualizing Displacement in the Americas (Upcoming, Duke UP) and Zapentera Negra, as well as journals including Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Barbarie Pensar Con Otros, and Momus. She is currently an artist-in-resident at UCSC. Rollow received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
