Maia Villalba, ‘From Olive Trees to Mangrove Leaves’, 2023
DESCRIPTION: “In collaboration with Artists Against Apartheid, an international anti-imperialist organization representing more than 8,000 artists, activists, and cultural workers in over 60 countries, I designed a political poster to celebrate the history of solidarity between Palestinian olive farmers in the occupied West Bank and Afro-Mexican water defenders in the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca. From olive trees to mangrove leaves, I hope to visualize how racialized human and other-than-human bodies are traversed by local and global structures of power. Inspired by the dynamic writings of Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera, Gladys Tzul Tzul, and Kim TallBear, Indigenous dignity means the desire to live communally, organize alternative economies, and perform everyday practices of resistance in service of the lands which give them life.”