Entering the main gallery at UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of the Arts and Sciences, visitors are confronted by a massive fallen tree made of earth and cement. Crafted by EDELO, an amorphous collective of creative participants founded by Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte, this work is the latest of the fifteen-year-old group’s social projects, which coalesce around uncanny images and evanescent, ritual-like actions.
Given its surreal manifestation indoors, the tree appears like an unexpected dream. What to make of its twelve-meter length and the openings at either end—one at its root, smashed up against angled concrete slabs, and another branching into smaller limbs? At the exhibition’s opening performance, a woman occupied the hole nearest the branching end as if seated in a kayak. Her apparent merging with the tree embodied one idea insinuated by the work’s title, Universidad de la Tierra (University of the Earth, 2025): all living things connect through the land.
The tree is heavy, staid, and still. A monument of sorts. But the activity that occurred in and around it emphasized another of the exhibition’s themes: movement—physical, political, and metaphorical. During the performance, the seated woman was signaled to by an older man standing at the tree’s other end. Smiling under his mustachio, but with evident serious intent, he waved to the ensconced figure and another overlooking the scene from atop several benches stacked against a nearby wall.
EDELO, Universidad de la Tierra (inspired by CIDECI Unitierra, Chiapas), 2025.
Afterward, that hole in the tree was covered by a set of small embroidered cloths depicting flowers, a waterfall, forest, insects, sun, and sky, as well as masked figures playing guitars and another hoeing a garden, below the words “Los trabajos cotidianos/fuentes de Resistencia” (Everyday work/sources of Resistance). Underneath the gardener are stitched the letters “EZLN,” initials for the Indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas.
As with all the exhibition’s works, the tree sculpture remains open to multiple possible uses and interpretations. Among the builders and activators of Universidad de la Tierra was a group affiliated with Barrios Unidos, an organization dedicated to ending mass incarceration and promoting social justice. EDELO works with such community-based collaborators and through such allusive manifestations as part of its commitment to cultivating collective power in response to fundamental questions that motivate its work: How to make the world a different, better place? How to confront or circumnavigate the brute force of the state and the legal fictions that suppress communities’ wishes? Compelled by questions like these, EDELO proposes alternative paths to social understanding and transformation, drawing on collective imagination to inscribe brighter futures.
EDELO, Universidad de la Tierra (inspired by CIDECI Unitierra, Chiapas), 2025.
Taking dreams seriously entails understanding that they’re not just the random unconscious firing of individuals’ neurons but also the stuff of collective reservoirs of possibility. The name EDELO stems from an acronym for a building in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, which had previously housed a United Nations office. The international agency abandoned the building in 2009 to avoid dealing with Indigenous refugees who’d occupied it while attempting to improve their region’s oppressive conditions. The building became a base for a series of projects by EDELO—En Donde Era La Onu, or Where the United Nations Used to Be—galvanized by Rollow and Duarte along with a shifting series of community members and others farther afield.
The collective’s collaborators include the artist Emory Douglas—also the Black Panther Party’s former minister of culture—who first joined EDELO in Chiapas in 2011. Douglas found common cause with Indigenous Zapatista painters and embroiderers, with whom he exchanged techniques, images, and ideas for a series of projects. He also shared with them takeaways from the cultural and political legacies of the Panthers, whose dreams of community-based mutual aid and self-determination closely overlap with the aims of the now thirty-year-old Zapatista movement.
EDELO, Zapantera Negra in Transit I, 2011/ 2025.
For instance, Douglas introduced into their collaborative artwork the phrase “I Am We,” attributed to an African folk saying, which the artists spelled out on a large cloth that hangs above the main gallery at UC Santa Cruz. The cloth is flanked by two painted portraits of masked Zapatista figures, accompanied by the words “Power to the People” in English and Spanish. Another towering example of Douglas’s influence enlivens Zapantera Negra in Transit I (2011/2025). The mural extends twenty feet from floor to ceiling, incorporating images painted on found plywood and housing materials. In one set of images, a menacing handheld gun points at the side of a larger-than-life floating youth, whose body is painted a deep orange. This figure smiles beatifically, laid out like Christ or the iconic image of Che Guevara in death. Elsewhere in the mural, a stylized black panther shares space with anonymous eyes gazing out from a signature Zapatista mask.
Another example of Douglas’s influence could be seen in one corner of the mural: a corn plant, the emblematic, staple crop for rural Zapatistas, grows next to a large sack labeled “People’s Free Food Program,” referencing the Panthers’ initiative to feed their community and foster autonomy against oppressive regimes—a dreamed-up act become reality. The mural’s imagery underscores how social transformation requires constellations of imaginative actions to remind, incite, and generate new meanings.
Like the tree/vessel/passageway/root of Universidad, EDELO’s sculpture Assembly (2011/2015) ramifies dreams and action in multiple directions. Its installation congregates fifteen long, low, heavy wooden benches constructed with fence boards, lumber, and mural fragments. Clustered and stacked like church pews in temporary storage, the benches are energized by hand-painted imagery. There is a sense of a crisis imparted in their scattered density and ad-hoc setup, an arrangement that suggests they’ve been pushed aside under the pressure of some urgent moment.
The painted images depict dark, white, and primary-colored humanoid creatures, frequently fragmented into limbs or torsos; laborers cultivating corn; and masked Zapatistas whose figures evoke the Black Panther founder Huey Newton in the well-known image of him seated as on a throne, holding a rifle and spear—though these Zapatistas wield corn plants instead. Also present are figures of Indigenous Mapuche of Chile, whose long struggle to reassert autonomy over stolen territory erupted into moments of spectacular and horrific police-inflicted violence. These references to ideologies and real-world political conflict underscore the stakes of coming together—and how communal effort provides the foundation for revolution.
Video plays an important role in the exhibition, not only because of the significant number of videos nor the medium’s ability to document past, fleeting moments from political demonstrations and rituals, but especially because of the dreamlike capacities of moving images. In one three-walled alcove, juxtaposed footage of the Black Panthers and the 2012 mass Marcha del Silencio (March of Silence)—initiated by members of autonomous Chiapas communities to protest decades of NAFTA’s harmful impacts, including food insecurity, poverty, violence, forced migration, and environmental disasters—loops with eight other videos of EDELO’s social performances.
EDELO, Burial, Chiapas, Mexico, 2011. With the collaboration of the community in Elambo Bajo, Autonomous Territory.
The simultaneous streaming of these quasi-surreal ceremonies interweaves moments that would otherwise appear disconnected; here, they assert shared actualities and aspirations—the effects of not simply surviving but striving for something greater. In Burial, Chiapas, Mexico (2011), a festive procession culminates in the internment of a leading figure who scoots herself across a misty landscape without using her lower limbs, eventually laying herself in a pit to be slowly covered, still alive, in fistfuls of earth by others. The performance both commemorates genocides of Maya people in Guatemala and Mexico and invokes the vitality latent in buried seeds, producing a complex mixture of affects and acknowledging both mortality and life.
The video highlights another EDELO theme: asserting individual difference as fundamental to shared human experience and creativity. In another example, Bartolomay: Oaxaca, Mexico (2012), an individual with amputated legs first hauls himself across beach sands before carving a set of stiff legs from pale, hard stone. Next, he is lifted up by others and placed atop the sculpture, then eventually taken down to undertake the destruction—with a hammer, chisel, and his own bare hands—of the prosthetic stand-ins for a fetishized abled body that he rejects, having enlisted the aid of others in the process of fulfilling his vision.
In a smaller theater constructed at the gallery’s rear, another set of videos plays simultaneously across three channels. In Chasing the Beast: Tijuana, Mexico (2021/2025), several individuals create models of homes they imagine living in, beyond their current bustling but resource-poor locale, which surrounds the viewer in the immersive setting. Carrying their creations in a casual street procession, they confront the border fence that prohibits them from pursuing their dreams, then set the models on fire.
Witnessing such gestures throughout the show—gatherings of people; dreamlike, captivating, half-explicable rituals; signs of care and mutual aid—generated in me, as well as others who experienced these works alongside me, deep feelings of compassion and humility. These moments propose the desirability—even necessity—of moving beyond coexistence toward collaboration and models for shared living, despite or even because of differences in perceived ability or need. The work of EDELO brings life to images and experiences that might otherwise remain buried, unconscious, or invisible, while demonstrating that social revolution is already underway and available to any viewer who feels moved to join.
