In the fall of 2009, over one hundred displaced indigenous community members occupied the offices of the United Nations, located in San Cristobal De Las Casa, Chiapas Mexico. The offices where taken over in hopes of gaining international attention from humanitarian organizations. After a few months of the occupation, the United Nations simply decided to find another building and moved.

A few months later, Caleb Duarte and Mia Rollow. disillusioned with the institutional proposed purpose of art, wished to believe that art could be a radical form of communication, and soon moved into the building and begin an experimental art space and an international artist residency of diverse practice. They began to invite artists, activists, cultural workers, inventors, gardeners, PhDs, jugglers, and educators to take part in creating an experiment on art and social change. This group of artists, disenchanted by the continuing linear path of art history, came to EDELO in favor of art as a vehicle for possible transformation.

Inspired by the 1994 Indigenous Zapatista uprising, where word and poetry are used to inspire a generation to imagine “other” worlds possible, EDELO has retained the name of the UN. It is a part of an investigation of how Art, in all its disciplines and contradictions, can take the supposed role of such institutional bodies: in creating understanding, empathy, and to serve as a tool for imagining alternatives to what seems to be a harmful and violent system that we have come to accept.

Mia Eve, a multidisciplinary artist, received her BFA with Honors from the University of Maryland and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A native of Chicago, she currently lives in Hyattsville, MD.
Upon receiving her MFA, she moved to Chiapas Mexico with her collaborator Caleb Duarte, where they founded EDELO (En Donde Era La Onu/ Where The United Nations Used To Be). EDELO was a community center and intercultural artist residency that was a collaborative laboratory for people coming from different sides of life. EDELO became a nucleus for their continuing work.

This work is created in site-specific lands of spiritual, social, and cultural resistance. It strives to facilitate the expressions of communities through distributed authorship demanding transdisciplinary creative forms in sculpture, performance, community-based public intervention, and psychomagic. Many of the works organize community participation in ceremonial processions that command a slight moment of hyper-visibility of an otherwise underground community. Through art projects, workshops, interviews, and intimate conversations participants produce and document collectively authored creations that function as aesthetic practices and as humanitarian efforts.

The work focuses on intersectionality as a nucleus for engagement and is centered around the themes of movement, tying together notions of ableism and white supremacy, human displacement, generational traumas, land, and human rights, child labor and femicide, autonomy, and self-determination.

Short Video using a small amount of the images that I have made photographically from 1999 to present documenting the murder rate in Baltimore City as manifested through graffiti. I started to see the graffiti, "R.I.P." everywhere I went in Baltimore. I went past one 2 blocks away from where I lived, it was on a wall on the corner of Whitelock St. and Druid Hill Avenue, "R.I.P. TROY." That is when I decided to start recording them photographically. I began asking people, showing them R.I.P. on a piece of paper, "Have you seen this anywhere?" Many said NO, right there in their own neighborhood on the walls, and people were not seeing them. I did not want to be alone viewing this madness.