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Towards an Aesthetics of ‘Commanding by Obeying’ in Zapatista Audiovisual Material

 
1a Natalia Arcos Iri La Corrala

“Detail of the 1st room while the Battle of Moscow is exhibited”, 2021. Photo credits: Patricia Leguina and Tino Varela.

It must be considered that the aesthetic ruptures were an attempt to organise, based on art, a new life praxis

–Peter Bürger

In 2013, a number of researchers in various disciplines,1 myself among them, began to develop the idea of aesthetics and poetics as structural elements of the political praxis of the Zapatista Movement, an idea we continue to explore to this day.

In various studies, publications, meetings, exhibitions and workshops, we have addressed the field of Zapatista aesthetics as if it were a super-system of meanings, the result of the burgeoning synthesis of Mayan cosmologies from

the Chiapas region with the ideologies of the Latin American left typical of the second half of the twentieth century.

1 Natalia Arcos Iri La Corrala

“View of the 1st exhibition room, with projections of films that the Zapatistas saw in hiding”, 2021. Photo credits: Patricia Leguina and Tino Varela.

On this occasion, however, and in relation to the exhibition that Massimiliano Mollona and I curated with the support of the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) at the Centro Cultural La Corrala2 in Madrid, the path followed by this research led me to a new vein of enquiry: obediential aesthetics, a new cultural paradigm.

If we consider the backdrop of poverty, deprivation, neglect and systematic abuse to which the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico were subjected (as are so many others still today in Latin America), we can see the Zapatista Movement is an archetypal example of art at the service of a people engaged in resistance and rebellion, since Zapatismo is an indigenous guerrilla movement with a powerful global impact which, thanks to the political and organisational experience it has acquired3 and in close keeping with local customs and practices, defines the originality characteristic of it.

In aesthetic terms, from the outset (in other words, from those early hours of 1 January 1994) the Zapatistas have presented us with the problem of self-representation as the construction of an image projected into the public light and the media. In the early days of the guerrilla offensive, of the communiqués and balaclavas, the eyes of the entire world press were on the sole target that embodied the whole movement, Subcomandante Marcos. So, as they themselves told us, to ensure the press and civil society turned their attention to them, they constructed Marcos as a hologram that the indigenous communities projected towards the Western world.4 One only needs to look back at the documentaries made between 1994 and 2006 to see that they all focus on him. This public relations plan proved successful.

2a Natalia Arcos Iri La Corrala 07260 3

“Video of Tercios Compas: Las Choferas”, 2021. Photo credits: Patricia Leguina and Tino Varela.

This mechanism of seduction on a large scale came from insurgent wisdom acquired over a long indigenous tradition of appropriating images. Whereas Western paradigms are fixated solely on their canons and so render other human and non-human practices invisible, the indigenous strategy of resistance (in keeping with yet surpassing the symbolic disobedience advocated by the Peruvian intellectual Víctor Vich) consists of appropriating the colonial imaginary, giving it a semantic (and often hermetic) turn and hence a utility completely contrary to the intentions of the repressive colonial hegemony.5

While this symbolic disobedience is effective for the purposes of resistance, another mechanism has emerged for organising the meanings of the autonomous Zapatista space: obediential aesthetics, in other words, the aesthetics of the ethics of ‘Obediential Commanding’,6 which Professor Enrique Dussel defines very well: ‘the painter has transformed himself into the subject of an obediential aesthetics and the community is the creative centre of all aesthetics, as it always has been for millennia in every human culture. As the community is the originating centre, we shall term it, unlike politics, the potentia aesthetica. The aesthetic community does not obey the rules of (Kantian) geniuses; rather, it is the potentia that commands (those that obey are now geniuses transformed into obediential artists) and creates, in the final analysis.’7

As we said earlier, aesthetics combined with politics forms the backbone of Zapatismo: the poiesis and the praxis that appear as ‘originality’ in the eyes of the West: demands, communiqués, agroecology, stagings, clinics, tours, schools, festivals, artworks, etc. that convey imaginaries, cosmologies, practices, customs and a radical rebelliousness encompassed in the holistic experience of ‘Commanding by Obeying’.

0 Natalia Arcos Iri La Corrala

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