The first survey exhibition of artists Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte, EDELO brings together new and existing works emerging from their collaborative and individual fifteen-year explorations into the roles art can play in radical modes of community building and social, political, and economic change. 

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EDELO features video, sculpture, installation, and performance works, many of which have never before seen in an art institutional context, which together show the trajectory of  the artists’ collaborative practice since 2009. That year, Rollow and Duarte repurposed the abandoned United Nations building in San Cristóbal de las Casa, Chiapas, Mexico, renaming it EDELO (En Donde Era La ONU/ Where the United Nations Used to Be). The building had been abandoned by the UN after displaced indigenous community members occupied its offices. Inspired by the 1994 indigenous Zapatista uprising, which used art as a tool to demand immediate and drastic social and economic change, Rollow and Duarte collaborated with members of the community to reimagine the building as an intercultural artist residency, experimental art laboratory, and safe house. 

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Artworks in EDELO reflect on that experience and the continued practices by Rollow and Duarte to work in collaboration with diverse communities, creating radical spaces and artworks that confront the failed institutional responses to social and political oppression.

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The exhibition is organized as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to contribute to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons.

Image: Collaborative performance, Walking the Beast, Alberque La 72.Tenosique Tabasco Chiapas. Video still E.D.E.L.O 2014.