In 2009, the Primer Festival Mundial de la Digna Rabia (First World Festival of the Dignified Rage) took place. Under the name “Otro Mundo. Otro Camino: Abajo y a la Izquierda” (Another world. Another path: From below and to the left) this gathering, organized by el Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), celebrated their fifteenth anniversary of the uprising they led in 1994 against the Mexican state. Rigo 23 visited Chiapas for the first time to assist this festival.

During the fifteen years that had passed since the uprising, the legacy of the revolt had traveled the earth reaching all its corners. Its post-Cold War understanding of revolution, its proposed forms of governance, and its reinventive approach to democracy have shaped many of the world´s uprisings that have followed – before and after 2009.

Reflecting on this, Rigo 23 transformed this thought into a prompt to local artists, artisan cooperatives, creators of all fields, cultural activists, and members of the grassroots organizations affiliated to the movement: what form would a Zapatista´s cosmology take in a journey to other galaxies?

The result is an immersive, multifaceted, and highly detailed installation that takes the visitor on a journey that starts in Chiapas and travels through different instances before returning the guest to their city of origin – this time in Lisbon. This spatial and galactic framework fixes on established imaginaries of the Zapatistas but also sways it into a speculative realm that broadens them. In it, their Maya cosmovision of the world meets the material present of the Zapatistas, their ideas of world-making while encountering the narrative potentials of science fiction. Throughout the installation, found objects such as doors and walls, combine with tapestries, paintings, phrases, sculptures and crafts that together make and take an idea of the Zapatistas to other lands in a dialogue built spatially across image, text and the geographies it has travelled to.

In this sense, the installation is a journey but also a spaceship imagined and constructed by Zapatista community members who prefer not to be named individually but instead by affiliation. As this spaceship travels it navigates the thin boundaries that border and negotiate questions of authorship, appropriation, and representation. In this sense Rigo appears more as a facilitator and curator, than author, who started, through a question, a correspondence that keeps growing as he receives new responses from different agents in the territory.

In a post-globalized world with far-right authoritarianism on the rise, el Programa Espacial Autónomo InterGaláctico (InterGalactic Autonomous Space Program) preserves its dialogic capacity with Zapatista aesthetics and ideals while putting in motion a desirable vessel of flight from the resulting change of paradigm.

Rigo 23 (b. 1966, Funchal, Portugal) has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since the mid-80s. With an emphasis on forms of community practice, Rigo 23’s murals, paintings, sculptures and public interventions have been exhibited at the Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2011); the New Museum, New York (2009); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói, Brazil (2007); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile (2000); and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum (1999). Rigo 23 has also been included in international biennials and exhibitions such as the Biennale of Urbanism/Biocity Architecture in Shenzhen and Hong Kong 2009; the Biennale de Lyon 2009 in Lyon, France; the 4th Liverpool Biennial in 2006; and the California Biennial in 2004 at the Orange County Museum of Art.