In the Café, architect Stavros Sofianopoulos will present “Building the Chiapas Teachers Center” an initiative by the Greek Solidarity Team of support for the Zapatistas’ campaign “A School for Chiapas” [Centro de Capacitación  de Promotores Culturales Compañero Manuel (Chiapas, Mexico)]. The initiative will be presented in the context of Community based-art.

Schools for Chiapas was created in 1996 and this year has begun to work with other indigenous communities that are facing similar government-inflicted pressures, seeking to support their own processes of building autonomy in education and preventive health. Informed and moved by the models demonstrated over years in Zapatista territory, these efforts are shared by the community to benefit everyone.

In community-based education, adults chosen by the community learn skills in popular education so that they can share responsibility of teaching the children. For communities whose schools have been closed or are not accessible (due to violence), this model allows for education to carry on despite often precarious external conditions.

The event will be hosted by Yannis Ziogas, WALC Project director and Artistic co-coordinator. The presentation will be made in Greek, with an English translation made available. At the event a pdf in English and Greek will be available from here. Although technology, and AI specifically, is making great strides in benefitting cross-cultural interchange, Zoom has not yet conquered the Greek language, so we are unable to offer real-time interpretation from Greek to English or closed captions in Greek.