Mia Eve Rollow

Mia Eve Rollow (born 1984) is an American multidisciplinary artist based in Chipas, Mexico. She co-founded the EDELO arts collective along with Caleb Duarte.
Biography
Mia Eve Rollow was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1984. She received the Creative and Performing Arts Scholarship to attend the University of Maryland where she received her BFA in 2006. Rollow completed her graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago earning a master's degree in 2009. Her artworks are often performative in nature, and due to her fascination with alchemy and shamanistic traditions, her work usually revolves the physical and spiritual world. A college classmate, Caleb Duarte, invited her to Mexico to work on an experimental project based around the Zapatista movement. She later moved to Chiapas, Mexico where she co-founded the EDELO arts collective along with Duarte.
Artwork
Mia Eve Rollow works in a variety of media including video, painting, installation, and performance art. In 2017, Rollow had a solo exhibition titled, Eve: A Series, which featured large-scale video projections of natural phenomena. She primarily produces art through EDELO in collaboration with its community members.
EDELO (En Donde Era La Onu/ Where the United Nations Used To Be)
EDELO is a community and artist interactive project founded in Chiapas, Mexico from 2009 to 2014. Recently, it has become nomadic, and has evolved to become EDELO Migrantre. It is an itinerant, conceptual artistic space where the local community can collaborate. EDELO was originally created out of offices abandoned by the UN after members of the indigenous community took occupation. Over 100 members stayed for several months, and this led to Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte to officially found EDELO. It was an art space centered around the people to create a safe environment and experimental outlet for them. The project was set in Chiapas, Mexico where its residents and self-governing communities that have long used performance, theater, poetry and culture to proclaim social, political and economic change. They focused on the teachings and previous art of the , who utilized art for social change to counteract the 500 years of systemic oppression and misrepresentation. Specifically, the project had themes like human rights, child labor, femicide, autonomy, human displacement and self-determination. In 2019, EDELO Migrante visited both India and Palestine to practice artmaking in site-specific areas such as Dheisheh Refugee Camp in West Bank, Palestine and Gokarna, India. Both movements utilize their culture and aesthetics to portray freedom and rebellion. Zapantera Negra, arranges oral histories, creates militant artwork, and produces original documents drawn from both of their struggles.
Padre No Me Pegues
The performance, Father Don't Hit Me (2012), is a demonstration done in Chiapas, Mexico, as part of the Arte Urgente series. Two performers are sweeping up hundreds of gesso penises in the central plaza. This conceptual piece was intended to bring awareness to the ongoing violence in the community, especially femicide and gender-based brutality. The phrase, "If they touch one, they touch us all," was used across the series of performances to create unity.
Our Built City
Our Built City (2015), was an event organized outside the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco, California. The project turned the entire neighborhood into performance site as an act of "sculptural housing," and community members were invited to exhibit their neighborhood's struggles A mural of police shooting victims is portrayed on the wall of the building, and includes Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Alejandro "Alex" Nieto as well as Amilcar Perez-Lopez, who was killed two blocks from the Red Poppy.

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