FRUTA PARA TODXS is an exhibition of the latest artworks by Katarína Janečková-Walshe, which approaches the body and food not as neutral metaphors of care, but as contested sites of production, extraction, and governance. Fruit circulates here as a material trace of land, labor, and conflict: of who cultivates, who distributes, and who is excluded from the economies that sustain life. The project situates this circulation within the broader conditions of militarization, territorial dispute, and low-intensity warfare that shape indigenous autonomy in southern Mexico, where the reproduction of everyday life becomes a political struggle rather than a private matter.
The collaboration with Her Clique and the allocation of proceeds to Border Kindness inscribe the project within a transnational network of material support that links gender and migration within a shared terrain of responsibility. Solidarity is not framed as symbolic alignment, but as a logistical practice that traverses the art circuit and connects it to community-based infrastructures of care, accompaniment, and survival. At the same time, the project sustains a visible tension between redistribution and cultural legitimation, between concrete aid and symbolic capital, as an unresolved condition of institutional engagement.
The work refuses to treat the archive as a space of preservation alone. Instead, the exhibition is approached as a site where practices of autonomy, care, and resistance encounter systems of visibility and valuation. Fruit operates as a material that cannot be stabilized: it perishes, disappears, and requires participation. Its presence draws attention to questions of permanence, ownership, and value without resolving them, favoring an economy of encounter rather than accumulation.
Within this framework, circulation is examined not as flow, but as infrastructure. The movement of fruit from hand to hand foregrounds the conditions under which care is organized, delegated, and often feminized. The gesture of offering becomes legible as labor — productive, reproductive, and political — embedded in uneven relations of power that determine whose work is recognized and whose sustains the social field without visibility.
FRUTA PARA TODXS draws on practices of autonomous governance that reorganize social, political, and economic relations through consensus, collective decision-making, and governing by listening. These practices are approached as sites of tension shaped by military presence, paramilitary violence, and the demands of self-sufficiency. In this context, fruit becomes a material index of autonomy: a product whose significance lies not only in its consumption, but in the collective processes that shape its production and circulation.
The form of the spiral — associated with regional structures of communal organization — reappears here as a spatial and social logic. Circulation unfolds outward from a communal center, mapping a geography of obligation rather than a network of exchange. What is traced is not a market, but a field of mutual accountability that binds bodies to territories and decisions to consequences.
The figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe is approached here not as a devotional symbol, but as a colonial and national technology of the body: a visual regime through which femininity, obedience, and sacrifice have been historically organized and naturalized. Her circulation across domestic altars, public monuments, and state iconography has functioned as a pedagogy of care aligned with submission — an economy in which protection is exchanged for loyalty, and suffering is reframed as moral virtue.
Placed in direct tension with the Zapatista woman, the Virgin becomes a site of ideological friction. While the Marian figure encodes care as intercession and transcendence, the Zapatista woman materializes care as governance and decision-making: not the body that prays for justice, but the body that organizes it. The project stages this confrontation not as a symbolic opposition, but as a struggle between two political grammars of care — one rooted in spiritual authority and national mythology, the other in autonomy, collective labor, and the refusal of delegated power.
Rather than proposing an alternative world as an abstract horizon, FRUTA PARA TODXS stages a series of material frictions within the present. It locates politics in perishable matters, in the choreography of bodies, and in the slow, negotiated processes of decision-making that unfold beyond the spectacle of protest or the neutrality of the exhibition place. What emerges is not a utopia, but a practice: a circulation of food, gestures, and responsibilities that insists on autonomy as something enacted daily, under conditions of pressure, risk, and unequal power.
Text written by Tan Uranga