After the Zapatista uprising on January 1st 1994, the EZLN organised its first national meeting with the civil society in San Cristóbal de Las Casas in 1996, The ‘Foro Especial para la Reforma del Estado’.

In the Forum’s table n.7  “Culture and Media in transit towards Democracy” the sub comandante Marcos delivered a speech involving horses, moons, sharks, a beetle, a dramaturg and neoliberalism. As he said it was passed onto him by his old pal Don Durito de la Lacandona, the most famous insurgent beetle in Mexico, whom himself confessed to have appropriated a text by Bertolt Brecht to inspire the important presentation and discussions around the topic. Marcos, Durito and Brecht convened into a Zapatista narration dated “Berlin-San Cristòbal 1949-1996” full of metaphors and poetic justice against neo liberalism own exploitations and dispossessions And against what the Zapatista will later call the (ongoing) Fourth World War. The narration is punctuated by a walk on the neighborhood of Moabit in Berlin in which the filmmaker’s voices her current preoccupations with the issues at stake, of equal importance in 1996 as in 2023, and considering whether the time for withdrawal and defection has arrived.

director’s notes from 2023:

If we shall continue the game of connecting through time and space, as in a quantum chrono Zapatista presence or as an affective mapping, these words would be heard again and again in the so called no-global movements of the cusp of the millennia, in the occupy and anonymous movements of the 2010s and are again proesent in issues and demands of many struggles today, as in the streets of France and Iran. In  many countries the transition of Culture and its media toward and in democracy is again at stake.This narration travels through time and languages, connecting visions of commoning and autonomy that are very well alive and inform collective memory and insurgent politics for emancipation and survival.

director’s notes from 2024:

To disert is no longer an option for the time being. The colonial and the fascisms haven’t been a post-, organise accordingly.

Bertolt Durito y Marcos.And we. Recreate everything.

Bertolt Durito y Marcos.And we. Herzlich Wilkommen.

Bertolt Durito Marcos.ANd we. Joint presentation.

A commissioned work with footage from TPF&VA

Segments of a speech by subcomandante Marcos in San Critòbal de las Casas in 1996 resonate into the streets of Genoa during the so called no-global international demonstrations against the G8 meeting in 2001. The selected footage is of the days before the riots and the bloody State repression started on July 20^th. Independent media, rural power farmers, land and indigenous rights advocates, the Lgtb+ pink bloc, anarchists, d.i.y. tv and streaming groups, liberation theory priests, internationalists, social workers, students, families, No Borders collectives, street theatre performers, and many more walk by, chanting, screaming and dancing. In what would become a massive 4 days of demonstrations against neo liberalism and its financial global dispossession and exploitation.

director’s notes 2021:

The so called no-global movement, the biggest western insurgent international anti-capitalist movement in recent decades, started out following the Zapatista’s insurrection in Chiapas, Mexico, on January 1994. The Zapatistas sparked a breech into many people’s imagination, bringing into concrete reality what many were only theorizing. Their organization and actions illuminated potency over power. The work made with footage from TPF&VA traces recent stories of issues and struggles we, still, urgently face today.

The Insurgent Archive, 2021-22, Laveronica gallery, Modica, Italy

The Insurgent Archive.

Laveronica gallery

TPF&VA n.0, 2022, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin

TPF&VA n.0

press

BerlinArtLink

il manifesto

exibart