“What is important is that we are women and that we are women who struggle, that is, we do not resign for what is happening to women; so, each of us rebels and struggles (according to our own way, time, place). We get pissed and do something about it.” Words of the Zapatista women at the opening ceremony of the First International Gathering of Politics, Art, Sport, and Culture for Women in Struggle in the Zapatista Caracol of the Tzotz Choj Zone, 2018. (Translation, Amanda Ruiz Méndez)

 

In light of the current climate crisis, and the accompanying anxiety many of us are experiencing as a result, it is important to ask how we can challenge capitalist and patriarchal notions of the future. The Global North needs to consider feminist Indigenous worldviews, with its particular ability to remain expansive and inhabit various forms of knowledge. In the face of these challenges, the artworks and performance in this exhibition provide an intimate look at this view as it materializes in real-time.  

 

Cuando las montañas se mueven, an exhibition by Montreal-based, Mexican artist Amanda Ruiz Méndez, considers a future that acknowledges Indigenous knowledge systems, especially within the Zapatista community. Especially systems and concepts that have existed long before the violence inflicted from Colonization, from extraction, and from capitalism. Described by the artist as resistance within the resistance, Indigenous Zapatista women have held an instrumental role resisting capitalism and patriarchy, an intersectional struggle against the violent process of forced Globalization. Cuando las montañas se mueven visualizes this resistance, establishing a space for knowledge-making and dialogue between women. Through various mediums - ceramics, textiles, photographs, videos, installations - Ruiz Méndez’s work emphasizes Indigenous Mexican Zapatista women, as their collective force transforms the landscape around them. 

 

The exhibition, both material- and research-based, started from the artist’s exploration of fear and hope through rubbings, sculptures, and photomontage. This transformed into fictional gatherings, interventions of texts and participatory performance. As part of the exhibition, Ruiz Mendez’s performance International Gathering of Women-Mountains invites four women, all activists from Montreal, to weave words written by women land defenders on relationships to the territories where they live.  According to the artist, the process can be considered “functional composing.” Ruiz Méndez connects people, spaces, images, sounds, texts to articulate the relationships between them. Considering public spaces as a potential space for exhibition or performance, her artistic practice is inherently informed by her activism, at once producing knowledge and practicing hope, walking backward and forward between possible futures and history.

 

Ruiz Méndez demonstrates the necessity for Feminist and Indigenous worldviews in the Americas and globally as an inherently subversive way to exist. “What I want to offer to the public,” Ruiz states, “is the opportunity of learning about a future that does not involve the individual economic growth, but the collective work that feeds the culture-nature dynamic.”

 

By: Josh Marchesini