ON THE PRECIPICE OF TIME Practices of Insurgent Imagination

The Zapatista Forum Madrid, 16 – 17 – 18 – 19 September 2021

On the Precipice of Time, courtesy of Mao Mollona 2021, Watercolor and ink on paper 210mm x 297mm

a four-days programme scheduled on and around the arrival of the Zapatista contingent in Madrid and operates in deep connection with activists groups in Madrid and beyond articulated in the spaces of, and in collaboration with Centro Cultural La Corrala, Reina Sofia Museum, La Villana de Vallekas, hablarenarte/Planta Alta in the framework of Encuentro de luchas por la vida y Our Many Europes

The Zapatista Forum is not a pre-set political event or cultural spectacle. It is a small seed in the long and ongoing revolutionary process that has in Madrid an important historical convergence in the journey the Zapatista contingent is making. IRI mission is to prefigure and implement forms of post-capitalist life through research interventions in the areas of care, political economy, art, and pedagogy. In this slow and constant tension The Zapatista Forum acknowledges how the Zapatista’s revolutionary horizon inspires our practices, connects its journey to local processes, and gives it international and regional resonance throughout IRI’s networks and nodes. The Zapatista utopia of “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos” – a world where many worlds fit – is not a fantasy. It is a revolutionary project, putting together conflict, practices of self-government and the constant exercise of imagination in the constant creation of new possibilities. These possible “nuevos mundos” – new worlds – are not situated on the Eurocentric line of the linear future, they live in the different temporalities of subaltern people. In a time of unprecedented crisis, caused by the Covid19 pandemic, the Institute of Radical Imagination aims at opening a discussion and a dialogue between Zapatistas, European and Global-South experiences of self-government sound the themes of commoning, care, struggle, institutional infrastructure and pedagogy as form of insurgent imagination decolonized from Eurocentric notions of utopia and capable of disrupting the hegemony of capitalist visions of our present and future. “On the Precipice of Time. Practices od Insurgent Imagination. The Zapatista Forum” was conceived by the Institute of Radical Imagination within The School of Mutation as a space to start opening encounters and discussions on and around Zapatistas and develops all along 2021. It reflect IRI’s multidisciplinary collective and DIY ethics and methodology. Building on the four main iterations emerged and articulated within the School of Mutation in 2020: UBI or the question of wealth/poverty’; Militant Images; Radical Research and Pedagogy; Ecofeminism and the necropolitics of Care.