ARTIST CALL OUT ∞ Borderlands Visions: Anti-Border Futures
Exhibit Dates: April 12 - July 27, 2025

Hello everyone!

We are excited to share this call out for our fourth and last exhibit to round out the four-part Borderlands Visions series. This last exhibit, titled Anti-Border Futures might seem contrary to the series title. However, we end on this note because it is the reality of living in the borderlands, what Chicana queer theorist Gloria Anzaldúa aptly called “an open wound” and “a thin edge of barbed wire we call home”, that is the necessary precondition to generating a world otherwise, precisely because we have had to sit with, feel, think, endure the painstaking physical, emotional, psychological, epistemic, and embodied violence that borders constantly produce and sustain.

As we gather to build a world without borders, this exhibit is an invitation for each of us to accompany each other in non-judgmental, not-prescribed path where we are guided by a politic and ethic of respect and integrity. One where we can be our true and authentic selves not split, divided, compartmentalized, or fragmented by the multitude of borders (political, sexual, geographic, psychic, among many others) that have kept us from not just being alive, but truly living.

Anti Border Futures

We face a day-today reality where border walls and immigration checkpoints have long structured the parameters of a national-territorial, border-centered, global, interstate system/regime set on producing precarity and deportability in the service of political and economic elite bent on maximizing profit margins on the backs of racialized/gendered working-class communities. We are seeing such parameters “erode” as the logic of policing that it rests upon is being extended in previously unimaginable ways, including into our most intimate of spaces. There are no “safe spaces” under encroaching fascism, not simply because the term triggers fascists, but because the raison d’être (reason of being) of a bordering and policing colonial logic is to contain and control. In a world turned upside down, such approach to control, ironically rests upon breaking past “borders” or limits of the unimaginable, crafting new rationalities and technologies of power and surveillance, expanding the imagination of domination, however paradoxical it may sound. Yet, its purpose is to freeze and contain our own imaginations, our own dreams and yearnings for freedom, liberation, autonomy and self-determination. 

However, one crucial element that all totalitarian and fascist encroachments and aspirations always undermine is the creative spirit that undergirds and sustains all life forms, both in their resistant modes and generative forms. Understood another way, no matter the oppressive logics and practices that seek to impose a monotone, monolithic existence, the raison d’être (reason of being) of los/las/les de abajo is to create, in multifold ways—artistically, politically, spiritually, and materially—that foreground what many communities call the beauty way. Let us dream, imagine, envision and bring to fruition the process of manifesting and actively creating alternative futures that challenge existing structures, norms, borders, and dominant narratives that seek to contain our freedom, our bodies, our feeling/thinking, our creative spirit. In sentipensandoser (feeling-thinking-being) an anti-border “future” into existence, in ways that defy the past-present-future triad that defines the West, the dominant order, the current structuring and bordering of nation-states, and the future-oriented/orientalism of modernity/coloniality, let us shift beyond equally constraining prescribed futures “over there” to be the rupture(s), the unbound, the at-once potentiality and always becoming that continues to transform. Such is the basis of freedom dreams that sustain our ongoing struggle for decolonial horizons that resist definitions, boundaries, parameters, and borders. This is the spirit of the ambiguous, undefined, multi-media, anti-media contributions that we seek in this call to artists whose specific aim is and should be, to invoke Black revolutionary George Jackson’s implicit reminder, for the sake of few words simple enough for everyone to understand: to refuse and defy.

In other words, create some Tlazohteotl (sacred shit) that takes us elsewhere, a otro pinche mundo, because that is what is called for by the political realities of today. To be clear, not some form of disengaged liberal escapism but rather a transformative invoking of the “ancestors in the present” for a valuing of life in a mundo de (profane) mierda, a civilization of death or rather of compulsory consumption/destruction that negates the creative dimensions of a life/death cosmic balance.

We encourage you to submit art piece(s) that address the above themes to be part of the final exhibition in our Borderlands Visions series—Anti-Border Futures. If you’re interested in submitting, see the details below:

• Submit form by: April 4th

• Art drop-off: April 5-6 & 8-9 from 12-5 PM

For questions, feel free to reach out via email: events.ccdlr@gmail.com

Registration form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSczhx5sRB4QhnVkzLEKPWKrO6GOms6KOiwAPXXX-NfYOCLUNw/viewform?

See the end of the form for the DROP OFF and PICK UP dates, guidelines and requirements.

We Teach Life: Towards Different Geographies and Calendars

Artwork will be showcased at the Centro Cultural de la Raza from January 6, 2025 to March 30th, 2025.

The 2025 Enero Zapatista exhibition is being organized in conjunction with a four-part series of exhibits, Borderlands Visions, which seeks to rethink, reimagine, reorient and re-embody how we conceive of and experience the borderlands, understood as those in-between spaces created by the emotional residue of unnatural boundaries. As such, the exhibit has a twofold goal of drawing attention to how borders operate differently across geographies, but also to highlight the refusal of said mappings of power. We encourage you to submit art piece(s) that address the above themes and represent the Zapatista spirit of autonomy! Today, the struggle continues and we stand in solidarity with all people worldwide who are fighting to teach life in a time of livestreamed genocide and soundbite gaslighting.

For full ENERO ZAPATISTA CALENDAR OF EVENTS (with event descriptions): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qYZ9uUQ2o4B8VGhHY6Z8xqzb3E2fxkxt/view

If you have any questions, please email us at comparteSD@gmail.com
Looking forward to another amazing Enero! #enerozapatista #enerozapatista2025

Community Centro Gardening Volunteer Days

Second Saturdays, 10am-2pm open to Community. Once trained, watering support needed on Tuesdays and Thursdays

Come work with our garden volunteers in caring for Centro’s Mat Ichech Gardens - Yolotlalli - Corazon de la Tierra - Heart of the Land.
Learn about the native and medicinal plants, proper watering techniques, composting and more.

Tianguis de la Raza: Free Community Artisan Market

Every Third Sunday of the month (except January and February): Next on December 15, 2024 - 12 to 5pm

We invite you to be part of the Tianguis de la Raza.  This artisan market's mission is to create a space that connects local crafters and community members to promote an autonomous economy and community building.  There are always arts, crafts, natural self care products, home goods, and much more. Plus, there will be fun activities for the entire family, including Live Music and children’s art workshops. Come out to connect and have some fun.  Updates for each event will be posted in our profile page: Tianguis de la Raza