Rigo 23: Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program

Initiated by San Francisco-based artist Rigo 23, Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program is an interdisciplinary collaboration with weavers, seamstresses, painters, carpenters, and cultural activists from Southern Chiapas, Mexico. Conceived as a series of sculptures and large-scale environments, Rigo 23’s project for the Gallery at REDCAT is the outgrowth of direct negotiations with the Good Government Junta of Morelia, Chiapas, developed around the theme “Another World, Another Path,” articulated in 2009 by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) at the First Global Festival of Dignified Rage—an event that marked the group’s fifteenth anniversary and underscored its belief in a utopia related to Mayan conceptions of the cosmos. Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program takes the form of a planetarium, in which constellations and spacecrafts based on the iconography and imagery of the EZLN are realized for the purposes of intercommunal and intergalactic dialogue.