a world that contains many worlds
Authors: Cozzolino Francesca , Solomoukha Kristina ,   École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs Paris
Published: October 2024

This article presents image-based research on the iconographic production of the Zapatistas (Chiapas, southeastern Mexico) and the visual universes that are invoked here (Cozzolino & Solomoukha, 2021). Product of the collaboration between an anthropologist and an artist, this research project is composed of an interactive visual atlas made up of images from different sources, temporalities, and systems of historicity. We question how these images reflect transnational and transhistorical political cultures, and how the Zapatistas repurpose different iconographic traditions. Drawing inspiration from Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas and his method, we have created a constellation of images based on the repetition of a motif, the caracol, which evokes for the Zapatistas the imagery of a political process that is “slow” (in opposition to the idea of capitalist progress), and also the marine snail or concha, which is found in the symbolic system of the ancient Maya. This motif, ranging from the representation of the snail to the spiral and the seashell, embodies both the Mayan past and the Zapatista ideals of the present (Gossen, 1996; Benjamin, 2000).

To determine the links between the images that make up our corpus, we have organized them into two shapes-the snail and the spiral-used in Zapatista embroideries. Then we associate other images with these representations (from Mayan archaeological sites, codices and pre-Hispanic museum collections) where these visual motifs are found, by taking into account the actors who produced them by variegating them with a color code (Ancient Maya in green; Zapatistas in blue; Zapatista supporters in purple).

At the iconographic level, the ambition of this research is to reveal “significant associations” between different visual cultures by bringing these images together through the effects of proximity and formal or symbolic resemblance. The caracol would constitute then the “core” of this cultural continuity (Lopéz-Austin 2001: 59) that we show through the image.

On the anthropological level, one of the aims is to question the way in which a culture produces the images that constitute its visual and political identity. Another of our objectives through our approach is to visually translate the processes specific to anthropological reasoning, such as ethnological analogy (Kubler 1972, Dehouve 2020), which enables us to postulate the existence of a cultural continuity between the past and the present in a given cultural area. Thus, this image-based research aims to test both the semiotic and formal legacy of an iconographic motif and the disjunctions that occur when a visual form acquires different meanings over time.

Playing with scales, unit comparison, image combinations, we want to deploy a knowledge that displaces the relationship of the visual to the objectivity of scientific analysis and seek the emergence of heuristic pathways through the image. Our aim is to shape an interpretative space of the image that is formed through the perspective of the reader-spectator and opens to a form of knowledge that is as much structured as aware (Laplantine 2005).