Taller XD/Cráter Invertido

We are Taller XD, a collective of editorial production, distribution and learning about self-publishing that is part of the Cráter Invertido (https://craterinvertido.org/), a collective of Mexican artists that is part of the Arts Collaboratory program (https://artscollaboratory.org/). The collective has participated in various events and art projects around the world. Being part of the Venice Biennale, Gwangju Biennale in Korea. Document fifteen in Kassel, with Lumbung Radio as Radio Tropiezo and Lumbung Press. Among other projects. We publish and distribute collaboratively and with the help of programs, projects, and organizations. The topics we address are: art and author books, comics and graphic novels, drawing, essays on politics, philosophy, social movements, struggles against hegemonic systems, social and cultural emancipation, and art. We have participated in various Art and Publication fairs. Among them: Index Art Book Fair in Mexico, BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair, I Never Read, Art Book Fair Basel, Printed Matter NY.

Luis Alberto González Arenas, El sistema esperanza neo-zapatista, Taller XD / Cráter Invertido, 2024 © Luis Alberto González Arenas

What is this thing we call hope and how is it encoded in times of despair? Why is this act and affection that enlightens us to possibility, but at the same time eats away at us so much? Where does it come from and how is it constructed? Does it have a dark side? What has been done in its name?

This book answers these and more questions through a deep journey, from a critical and polyphonic point of view, to the ideological, political and aesthetic root of neo-zapatismo: hope. This essay shows, for the first time, a fresh x-ray of the metaphorical principle that has sustained one of the most important resistance movements of our times.

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Sylvia Wynter, Desestabilizar la colonialidad ser/poder/verdad/libertad, Taller XD / Cráter Invertido, 2024 © Sylvia Wynter

How can we understand the marginalization and suppression of radical movements as an echo of the plantation economy? What are the conditions for change? What sustains other ways of being together? Sylvia Wynter's essay “Destabilizing the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, after Man, its Overrepresentation-An Argument,” has been read, part by part, paragraph by paragraph, aloud, consecutively, in different places and spaces in the CDMX in the summer of 2023.

In “Destabilizing the Coloniality of Being,” Wynter carries out this destabilization by writing the genealogy of Western man through the lens of the systematic and historical dehumanization of native and African peoples. The Argument could be considered a genealogy of anti-blackness and what anti-blackness implies for destabilizing capitalism. To understand capitalism is to understand the construction of Western man. And to understand the construction of this autonomous human being is to understand the category of race and private property.

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Vestige of a future in ruins

Scanning the last years of my life in 35mm. Here are memories that were edited only in color, some remembered with nostalgia, some desired, some not. Fast flicker without chronology of my wandering in CDMX and surroundings. This is a trailer, a reel, a gossip of my experience reduced to the minimum of what this city is; a geographical and historical tragedy and, by synecdoche, the human drama. It is an attempt to make visible events that in the narrative of the touristic and historical experience of this space are not contemplated; the daily life. Although in a very symbolic way and only with images that help to narrate this senseless tale; the tragicomedy of being part of this city and the joy of inhabiting it knowing it is fragile and aware that it will inevitably collapse.

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